The Alterego type family started in 2001 by layering the same bitmap letters on top of each other in Photoshop, then playing with transparency and layer sequence. In 2010 a previous version was released as part of Bold Monday’s Pixel Package, but was discontinued. Nevertheless, van Rosmalen didn’t want to let it disappear completely as he was still fond of the typeface — in fact, it’s one of his favorites. He decided to develop it further and prepare it for today’s design possibilities by adding more weights and three display styles (Alterego Big). The criss-cross of strokes progress over the now five weights from a thin waffle grid to a closed pattern of squares. All fonts share glyph widths across styles so they can easily be layered, individually coloured or even animated to striking effects. In this way, the otherwise one-dimensional bitmaps acquire an interesting spatiality and depth.

To make the new Alterego the versatile one among the chequered display typefaces, the fonts sport a fully fledged Latin Extended character-set including support for Vietnamese, Greek, Extended Cyrillic and Hebrew. And as a special bonus, we are offering a hearty variant for free (basic Latin character set).