Airam blends contemporary legibility with historic blackletter forms, creating a contemporary text face that speaks to the old European past. The term blackletter refers to a style of typefaces that evolved out of Northern Europe's medieval manuscript tradition. Often called gothic, or Old English, these letters are identified by the traces of the wide-nib pen stroke within their forms. Typefaces designed in this style normally exhibit a drastic thick-thin stroke contrast. They tend to be set a bit narrow, leaving the appearance of a black tone across the page. The strokes of these letterforms also appear quite "broken" in nature (indeed, the German term for blackletter - gebrochene Schriften - literally means broken letters).