Biome could be the typeface on the control panel of your spaceship. Its stripped-down, futuristic look is both futuristic and retro-futuristic. It reminds us of ultra-modern styles of furniture and architecture from the mid-20th century, but it also has the rugged simplicity of an organic machine. Its underlying shapes are squarish, but its angles are rounded and the diagonal ends of its strokes are soft.
Type designer Carl Crossgrove was experimenting with both amorphous shapes based on the superellipse (a curved shape halfway between an oval and a rectangle) and a “square, futuristic, mechanical” letter style; in the end he combined their contradictions into Biome. He describes the result as “both futuristic and organic, with a sense of calm.” He made the bodies of the lowercase letters very large, with a rounded square shape, but he also gave Biome ample space between letters, so that, for all its odd appearance, it would still be comfortably readable in a wide variety of sizes and applications.
