Permanent Collection

Set in Stone: Here-Now Launches Exemplar Typeface for Letters from Sweden

Posted on Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Designer/CD Edvard Scott at Here-Now in Stockholm just dropped us this treat for type fans, a very tactile and hands-on launch film for the Exemplar font designed by Göran Söderström at Letters from Sweden.

Edvard Scott: Films about typefaces look alike. Bézier curves bending, a specimen sliding past, a list of features. Exemplar needed a different argument. Göran began drawing it in 1994 and finished in 2026. The brief was to show time, evolution, and care, not glyphs.

So we moved the typeface, and the making of it, out of the screen and into stone. Then we let the digital back in, in glimpses. The two materials pass meaning between them. An idea is carved out of a head the way a letter is carved out of a block. You chip away until it is done.

“An idea is carved out of a head the way a letter is carved out of a block. You chip away until it is done.”

Two rules, set early: stay close to the craft, and no screens that are only animation. And a third, scale. We mixed still photography with motion so the film could move from the mountain to the block to the sign, and back.

Stone sculptor Barbara Adamsky cut the letters. We printed the type as stencils 1:1, and she traced the outlines onto the marble with a transfer pen. Everything after that is hand and eye: the angle of the chisel, the depth of the V, the serifs.

We filmed in Barbara’s studio in Pietrasanta, Italy, inside a larger marble workshop where the machines are the size of rooms, and a yard in Carrara, where the blocks come down from the mountain. Shot with a Fujifilm GFX 100 II for stills and video. DaVinci Resolve and After Effects did the rest.

Images

A white plaster sculpture on a wooden base with a measuring tool attached, overlaid with a digital wireframe of the capital letter M and U+0053 from the Exemplar Typeface. Frame from Stash Magazine article.

Large white numerals 12856 from the Exemplar typeface layered over stacked stone blocks, featuring technical labels for Exemplar, lowercase, numerals, and currency and math. Frame from Stash Magazine article.

Stacked Exemplar stone slabs leaning against wooden supports in a Here-Now workshop. Frame from Stash Magazine article.

A person wearing earmuffs uses a power tool to carve an Exemplar typeface into a piece of stone on a wooden workbench in a studio. Frame from Stash Magazine article.

The word EXEMPLAR in large serif type by Letters from Sweden, with credits for designers Göran Söderström, Léo Guibert, and Laurette Colmard, and the years 1994 and 2026 surrounding a circular Here-Now line-art emblem. Frame from Stash Magazine article.

Credits

Client: Letters from Sweden
Latin/Cyrillic: Göran Söderström
Greek: Laurette Colmard
Arabic: Léo Guibert
Typographic support (2008): Rodrigo Cavazos and Stefan Hattenbach

Production: Here-Now
CD: Edvard Scott
DOP: Studio Kleiner
Designer/animator: Edvard Scott
Edit: Studio Kleiner and Edvard Scott
Grading: Studio Kleiner

Marble lettering: Barbara Adamsky

Music/sound design: Simon Adler
Mixing: Alexander Overington
Voice: Sir John Gielgud

Stephen Price

Stephen is the co-founder/CD of Stash Media Inc. and the executive editor of Stash Magazine and the Stash Permanent Collection.
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Category: Featured, Motion Design, Typography · Tags: Edvard Scott, Göran Söderström, Letters from Sweden, Simon Adler