Branding and the Psychology of Handwriting: The new NIVEA Care Type

At Juliasys Studio we’ve been working for some time now on a digital handwriting style for the “NIVEA” brand of Beiersdorf AG. “NIVEA Care Type”, as we are calling the new OpenType font, is understood to be the imaginary handwriting of the NIVEA brand persona, the “NIVEA Woman”. Care Type on product packaging and in marketing material has the function to subtly present the NIVEA Woman personality in the look and feel of the brand. Care Type is to be used prominently but at the same time sparingly, “with caution”.

Figure 1: A century of typographical metamorphosis on the legendary NIVEA tin

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Some Open Thoughts About OpenType

Typeface designers frequently seem to assume the more OT features their fonts have the better. Typeface users, on the other side, don’t always share this delight. They are often stressed by the complexity, don’t get any sense out of them or just ignore the features. Since I am both a designer and a user of typefaces I tend to sway from one position to the other.

In my work, where I am involved with script typeface design, OpenType features and coding play a very big role. I would say that a natural looking contemporary script typeface is not imaginable without an extended OT feature code.

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