Flos is an Italian designer and manufacturer of lighting concepts, bringing style and modernity to people's homes and offices. Since its foundation in 1962 it has worked with internationally acclaimed designers and continuously maintained a high quality in all its products. Moving with the times, Flos introduced the Cubo, a control system that allows the user to adjust the brightness of every lamp with a touch. As with all of Flos's products, the Cubo is a beautifully designed object in its own right. Although it is a stark cube shape, its surfaces are slightly convex to introduce a human softness and organic feel into the harsh geometric shape.

Dalton Maag was invited by London design agency GBH to collaborate in the development of a font to brand this specific product. To reflect the square design of the product, we decided that the font too needed to be based on a square grid, with the outer edges of the letter shapes being convex to break the stark geometric rhythm. The initial design studies covered differing degrees of curvature as well as varying the letter widths for a more proportional design. After much experimentation, the decision was to place all characters in the font on the square grid. This decision looks deceptively simple yet it is difficult to successfully implement; the treatment of diagonal characters breaks the square system, and the i and l had to be treated as an exception to the square rule. During the design process we encountered many characters that needed their minor details adjusting to be visually correct rather than blindly adhering to the system. The curving of the edges proved a challenge: too shallow and the curve would simply not register when set at smaller size, too deep and the character as a whole would look too round. Moving from a shallow curve into a tight radius that then continues with a shallow curve also challenged our designers when creating the corners of the outside letter shapes.

After many rounds of refining, the resulting font perfectly represents the Cubo brand. No other graphic device would have conveyed the understated style of the product so simply and effectively. The font design is now integral to all communications about Flos Cubo.