Mayor Mamdani has a new official font

FastCompany: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani gave the NBA Championship-winning New York Knicks keys to the city last week—and while that tradition is centuries old, the keys themselves displayed something new. The text written across the front was set in a new version of the serif typeface Empirica , custom made for the Mayor’s office and designed by the type foundry Frere-Jones Type. (Its founder, Tobias Frere-Jones, designed the typeface Gotham , arguably the most famous font in politics .) Now, Frere-Jones and his team have adapted Mamdani’s campaign type for a new era of progressive leadership .

Empirica, originally released in 2018, was designed by Frere-Jones and Nina Stössinger with contributions from type designers Fred Shallcrass and Devyani Mahadevan. It’s based on references to Ancient Roman inscription forms, and later interpretations of those forms in France in the 1800s. But when Mamdani’s office reached out to Frere-Jones Type about typography for its public-facing communication, the foundry recommended a modified version.

“We talked about some sort of modifications to individual characters we could make to bring in some of that painterly spirit,” type designer Tobias Frere-Jones tells Fast Company , referring to the campaign branding ’s original inspiration from New York City store signage. Now, the Mayor’s office has a version of Empirica that’s all its own. [Image: The Office of the Mayor] The foundry worked on the new version of the font with designer Aneesh Bhoopathy, who designed Mamdani’s campaign branding .

The result sits somewhere between stiff, traditional Roman type and Mamdani’s more personable, signage-inspired campaign fonts designed by Matthew Hinders-Anderson that’s a bit more formal for official use. “Empirica provides this very authoritative, historical sort of representative voice,” Stössinger says. The new edits made it more playful. [Image: The Office of the Mayor] The team designed a new “Z” to be used in front of an O for “Zohran” that’s tilted to better fit the letters next to each other. The strokes of other letters have extra flourish and flare.

“If you look at the capital “R,” the way that the leg kind of swooshes out, there’s a joy in that that’s amplified in this version, and I think to me, that’s a really beautiful combination to what makes the city what it is,” Stössinger says. While the type family was named for Roman Empire, it also, helpfully, looks like a lot of other typography around the city that gave us “Empire State of Mind.” Empirica is used at Manhattan’s Moynihan Train Hall , and its style is chiseled into buildings around the city.

[Image: The Office of the Mayor] “On a visual level, it kind of echoes a lot of patterns that are already visible in the city,” Stössinger says. Mamdani’s modified Empirica made its soft launch at his first 100 days address where it appeared on signs and placards.

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The introduction of a custom typeface for a public figure like Mayor Mamdani is significant for branding in politics and reflects a strategic approach to visual identity, making it relevant and somewhat novel in the context of public branding.