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, along with Jonathan Hoefler 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.
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.
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.
“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. It’s also appeared in videos on Link NYC kiosks, the “Put a Lid On It” campaign to put all trash in rat-proof containers by 2031, and in an apple logo that says “The Office of the Mayor.”
The keys given to the Knicks are decorated with an apple on the head of the key, and text that reads “The Mayor of the City of New York, Zohran Kwame Mamdani.”
The font isn’t just for logo type, signs, and mementos either; it works for heavy text too. The typeface is used in headlines and body copy in “Block by Block,” the housing plan Mamdani’s office released in May that calls for building 200,000 new affordable homes over 10 years and preserving an existing 200,000 units.
Typography played an important role in Mamdani’s distinctive campaign branding, spelling out his name and campaign promises in memorable lettering that was reminiscent of handpainted signs. But it’s rare to see a campaigning politician with good type take that same intentionality with them into office.
Mamdani’s mayoral fonts represent an evolution of his typographic voice from candidate to mayor. And while they by no means represent a complete rebrand, these nuanced refinements work well to both slightly adjust his positioning and create a visual throughline as he works to make good on campaign promises.
