From the designer, Tim Ahrens...

I started designing this typeface about half a year after learning that Frutiger was not a new brand of sweets and that Garamond is not the name of a fragrance.

In time it became clear that designing a sans serif must always be considered as a transformation of traditional serifed typefaces instead of deriving it from typefaces that have been derived from others which have been derived from others again. More…

I did not want Aroma to be one of those odourless and tasteless typefaces wich sacrifice a natural feeling and the characteristic shapes of the letters to neutrality.

I think that beauty often evolves unintentionally. For example, I am fascinated by the beauty of airfoils, which are actually a careful transformation of a bird’s wing. I love their anorganic and abstract shape which still bears the essence and all the complexity of what they are modelled on. This is exactly the formal concept behind Aroma.

Many of the outlines are actually parabolics. The small r, for example, consists exclusively of straight lines and parabolics.

I decided to give Aroma more stroke contrast than it is usual for sans serif designs. Many strokes are slightly convex, which gives the font an anorganic feeling.

The font was intended to have a feel similar to the antiqua. More specifically, it is based on Old Style Faces. The character of those fonts, which were cut during the Renaissance, is still inherent to Aroma.