Of course every tradition needs an easily referenced and readily identifiable name, and these new variants march under the banner of “humanist sans serifs.” The name seems apt given their warmer design, but its genesis is well rooted in typographic history: These typefaces are based on the humanist handwriting of the 15th century and the old-style typefaces that followed them (and that dominated printing until nearly the time of the French Revolution).

Today’s humanist sans serifs follow those Renaissance forms, but they are stripped of their ornamentation and most of their contrast, reduced to their essential forms and then reconstituted in a variety of weights. One characteristic of almost all humanist sans serifs is that they have true italics, not just slanted romans as so many other sans serifs do.

Profile® was designed by Martin Wenzel, a […] German designer from Berlin who studied in the Netherlands […]. Even if you didn’t know he’d been a student at the Royal Academy for Fine and Applied Arts, in the Hague, it would be obvious to anyone with an eye for the fine points of type that he’d been influenced by the humanist Dutch typographic tradition. Profile® clearly grows out of some of the same ideas and concerns that gave us Petr van Blokland’s Proforma and Luc(as) de Groot’s Thesis. (It also has some details in common with Erik Spiekermann’s Meta, which approaches the same problems from a somewhat different direction.)

The challenge with a sans serif typeface like this is to make it varied enough for comfortable reading in long blocks of text, yet simple and unornamented enough to define its space on the page. It should suggest an uncluttered, modern, clearly delineated world.