Bebas Neue Pro™: An Interview

Ryoichi Tsunekawa designed Bebas Neue Pro, the #2 bestselling new font of 2019 at MyFonts! We interviewed him to learn more.

What inspired you to design this typeface? Were you designing for a specific use case or customer? Or were you more focused on a particular artistic vision? Or some combination of the both?

Originally, I designed Bebas about 15 years ago. At that time, I didn’t have many design skills, and I had to train myself typeface design. I consider the original Bebas as a practice design, but distributed it to gather feedback from the world. I was fortunate that most of the evaluations were good.

Five years later, I updated the design and distributed again for the same purpose. This is Bebas Neue. I designed Bebas Neue for web and interactive design, rather than for print. It is primarily intended for image captions, banners, funny images, web shopping items captions, etc. In other words, the eye-catching part of web pages.

I designed Bebas Neue in response the increase of internet and social media users.

To make the Bebas Neue more useful, international and versatile, we added lowercase characters to the original design, added Cyrillic language support and expanded it to multi-weight family. This is the Bebas Neue “Pro.”

Walk us through the process of designing this typeface. Was there anything different about it, compared to your usual process? Did it come along more easily than others, or were there unique challenges?

There was no special technical process, except as mentioned above. The Bebas project started about 15 years ago. It took that time to get feedback from designers around the world and update the original design to a “Pro” version. This was a very big challenge for small foundry like us.

Looking ahead, are there new projects you’re excited about? Anything you haven’t tried yet but are eager to explore?

I am very fascinated by serif typefaces and monospaced designs.