A schoolbook version of the Work Sans font.

NotCourierSans is a re-interpretation of Nimbus Mono whose design began in Wroclaw at the occasion of the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008.

For more detailed information explore the files included in the font package (FONTLOG.txt) or go through the Font Info section (FONTLOG and Comment) in the font (open the font file in FontForge and go to Font Info in the Element menu).

The first cut of OSP-DIN was drawn for the festival Cinema du réel 2009, when we were invited to work on a cartographic version of the programme. We drew the first cut of the open source DIN from grid based drawings similar to the original 1932 drawings of the DIN we saw during our investigative trip to Berlin in February 2008.

The Alfphabet family is based on the Belgian road signage lettering called ‘Alphabet’ in French and ‘Alfabet’ in Dutch.

The Publi Fluor shop was situated in the northern part of Brussels, Schaerbeek, and founded by the father of Madame Christelle Crickx who was a trained letter painter. Starting to cut letters with the rounded and skilled cardboard templates drawn by her father, Madame Crickx slowly morphs the shapes by analysing how typographic niceties confuse her non-trained clients and leads to bad letters placement. She progressively removes the optical compensation of rounded tops and bottoms, straightens sides, and attaches accents for less floating parts. Those moves add a very specific orientation to this otherwise quite common bold italic sans serif display typeface.

Based of the lettering of old road signs in France for hamlets and localities. This lettering is also in use as clean vectors on some motorway signs in Luxembourg.

Violet Sans finds harmony in disparate forms, at once sharp and aggressive it can retreat to being gentle and smooth, allowing for different expressions within a single weight and style. Initially designed as an all caps display face with generous counterforms and extended crossbars, this same personality has been extrapolated into the wider character set. As a nod to the long tradition of geometric sans serif typefaces, in particular Eurostile, Violet Sans has been developed for modern applications with a bit of experimentation and haphazard gestures built right in. For daily use, enjoy.

A soft monospace (or proportional!) variable font by Tyler Finck.

Sono was initially only monospace. Sono was released in 2020 and was named for its most obvious characterstics: soft, monospaced. It has a low cap height which I enjoy when typing with THE CAPS LOCK KEY TURNED ON. Sono has been constantly updated and in 2022 received an additional axis called mono which has corresponding proportional styles. Those styles are prefixed with the name “Sans” for the sake of brevity. The name Sono doesn’t make as much sense now, but changing it would upset a precarious balance in the universe. Ok maybe not that severe. But it’d be weird. This is also the final free font I intend to make in the foreseeable future.

Sono comes in static styles for desktop and web as well as a single variable font and has received several updates since its release in August of 2018. It is available on Github and on Google Fonts.

Use & Modify is a personal selection of beautiful, classy, punk, professional, incomplete, weird typefaces. Open source licences make them free to use and modify. This selection is the result of deep search and crushes. This selection is yours.

In 2022, Hato press invited Raphaël Bastide to do a publication part of the zine series. In a wish to revive the “fan” part of fanzine, Raphaël Bastide decided to pay tribute to Wikipedia, a surviving, precious, unequaled place on the open WWW. The 16 pages riso print zine shows the encyclopedia’s interface as a post-human vestige, an artifact invaded by biomorphic figures and spreading typography. Through the pages of the zine, the reader discovers how the graphic elements are spreading like mycelium, creating an ornamental graphic network.

The Fungal font is a close collaboration between Jérémy Landes and Raphaël Bastide, so the characters of the zine can grow and spread thanks to their variable design. Fungal is a fork of DejaVu Sans, a libre font, popular on Linux systems.

The hypæ of the mycelium growing from each glyphs can be controlled in their length (the Grow axis) and in their thickness (the Thickness axis) allowing to fine tune the density of the rhizome growing on the page and the legibility of the text in the same move.

Fungal by Raphaël Bastide, Jérémy Landes. Distributed by velvetyne.fr

Used as a titling font, its height and the stability of its shapes lend it elegance, whilst details inspired by calligraphy and technique reveal all of Murmure’s notions of experimentation, research and creativity. Le Murmure is a typeface devoid of serifs which combines effectiveness, legibility and singularity. Its highly condensed proportions draw their inspiration from magazine titling fonts and add the editorial dimension the agency wished to endow their new identity with.

This typeface comes with many glyph variations, meaning alternate letters drawn in an even more original way. Here lies infinite potential which the users will take great delight in exploiting through a random opentype function.

Inga Plönnig's Magnet was a great influence on Le Murmure. If you like Le Murmure, you should defintely have a look at the broader family that Magnet has to offer.

Le Murmure by Jérémy Landes. Distributed by velvetyne.fr

Amdal is a Tifinagh typeface designed by Walid Bouchouchi - Akakir Studio. Tifinagh is the alphabet used to write Tamazight, a language common to several North African countries and an official language in Algeria and Morocco. This alphabet finds its origin in antiquity, it has long fallen into disrepair, and reintroduced thanks to the committed work of linguists and historians of the region.

Amdal is a titling font, born out of a lettering project for Korean fashion brand Merely Made, which was developing a collection inspired by the Sahara (North African desert) with the keyphrase “a better world”. From there began the development of a font with a limited glyphset intended to write a particular sentence. Then the rest of the glyphs followed until the glyphsets for Basic-IRCAM, Extended, Neo-Tifinagh and Touareg were completed.

“Amdal” means “World” in Tamazight (Berber language).

Amdal by Walid Bouchouchi. Distributed by velvetyne.fr

Bright colored and blobby shaped patterns of the poison dart frog mixed together with the strangely formed muscles in Japanese woodcuts. Kaeru kaeru combines both inspirations in one typeface.

It was created in a seminar called 'Type – Inspiration elsewhere' led by Jérémy Landes at the HfG Karlsruhe. The idea of the seminar was, to take different inspirations out of nature and illustrations and try to combine them to one typeface.

Kaeru Kaeru by Isabel Motz. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.

Grotesk is one of Velvetyne's first published typefaces. Designed by Frank Adebiaye in 2010 and released on Velvetyne in 2012, Grotesk is a heavily geometric sans serif typeface with an unusually large spacing. The original version of Grotesk is known because it was used on the official website of the city of Paris for many years. Even if the city's visual identity has changed since then, the broken 'S' of Grotesk can still be seen in some of the technical vehicles of the city.

In 2023, a new version of Grotesk developed by Ariel Martín Pérez was released. This new version introduces new weights that are multiplexed, which means that you can change the weight of the font without changing the width of the paragraphs. This new version also presents some subtle optical corrections. Last but not least, it considerably expands the glyphset of the font with a brand new lowercase set as well as language support for Russian, Ukrainian, Tifinagh and many Latin-based languages.

You can use Grotesk to give a relaxed and elegant touch to your texts, its subtle art-déco flavour will enlighten any composition.

Grotesk by Frank Adebiaye, with the contribution of Ariel Martín Pérez. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.

BianZhiDai is a font inspired by shading characters in ASCII art and 编织袋 (woven plastic bag in Simple Chinese). BianZhiDai is good with colors, especially in combination with different fill/stroke colors. Try it, and play it. Besides, the whole font is modular based, so you can customize it in Glyphs any way you like.

Sans-serif, but with calligraphic influence and strong contrast, Trickster borrows shapes from Merovingian writing, Blackletters construction and contemporean drawing. Trickster is a display typeface in one bold weight. Its unusual shapes, tight spacing and various alternates allow designers to create quickly strong headlines and beautiful titling.

According to Wikipedia, in mythology, and in the study of folklore and religion, a trickster is a character in a story (god, goddess, spirit, man, woman, or anthropomorphic creature), which exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge, and which uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and conventional behaviour. So that's the origin of the name of this typeface.

Trickster by Jean-Baptiste Morizot. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.

Sligoil is a monospace typeface. It has been designed for the interface of the Unknown Number game, published by Godolphin Games. Sligoil is also the name of an evil fictional company within the game.

The Sligoil typeface has been influenced by the culture of the British isles (the work of Matthew Carter, of course, but also signs on Irish whiskey distilleries) and also by the letters on vintage Space Cadet keyboards (produced by the MIT). It presents wide language support for Latin-based European languages and a collection of symbols and alternate forms (including upright italic letters).

Sligoil by Ariel Martín Pérez. Distributed by velvetyne.fr

Lithops is a very display, very unique, very complex semi modular font. Uppercase only, it was originally hand drawn in Procreate, and then processed in Glyphs 3. Its name stems from succulent plants to which it bears a resemblance, and was (loosely) inspired by Art Nouveau, Alzheimer brains and Matisse cutouts. Lithops started in February 2021 as a spontaneous creative outlet and glyph drawing exercise. Though it may not be easy to use and is difficult to categorise, Lithops serves as an exploration of the future of type design, begging the question: how complex can a font be, all while staying cohesive, legible and aesthetically pleasing, and most importantly, fun?

Lithops by Anne-Dauphine Borione. Distributed by velvetyne.fr

Avara is a libre transitional serif curveless type family. The placement of its nodes is exclusively based on a rough square grid. The original reason of this design choice was to facilitate collaboration on the font, and it now results in the radical and highly constrained shapes of this type family. It was started and first released in November 2011 by Raphaël Bastide; it has been updated since then and finally published here. It might be updated again in the future, tho. Maybe by you.

The Bold style was initiated by Raphaël Bastide and continued by Wei Huang and Lucas Le Bihan; the Bold Italic by Lucas Le Bihan; the Black was started by Walid Bouchouchi and Jérémy Landes, then it was boldened again and finished by Lucas Le Bihan.

Avara by Raphaël Bastide, with the contribution of Wei Huang, Lucas Le Bihan, Walid Bouchouchi, Jérémy Landes. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.

This typeface was designed with the Tarot de Marseille in mind. This led to a funny blend of medieval-ish and cooperblack-ish typeface. An anniversary update of June 2022 adds a lighter and sharper weight to the original bold and soft one.

The Basteleur Arcana represents a lot of things a designer can experience: new beginnings, having fun, crafting, but also a lack of confidence and having hard time to finish projects

Basteleur by Keussel. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.

Lineal is a Libre Family initiated by Frank Adebiaye and updated by the Velvetyne Team.

According to Frank, Lineal was originally inspired by the song called 2870 by Gérard Manset. It ended-up looking like a sort of Futura built with modules, without any optical corrections. Its first version was drawn in 2010 with FontForge 2.0. and published on Velvetyne on February 2011.

Since 2019, Anton Moglia worked on enhancing the character set, to fit his own needs (with Glyphs App). It was largely developed by Anton Moglia, who reviewed all the capitals, added lowercase letters and other symbols and gave it a more stable structure. He extended the family by adding weights, from Thin to Heavy and cleaned up the entire character set of superfluous curve points.

During 2023, Ariel Martín Pérez helped Anton Moglia publish this substantial update of Lineal, developing the character set for other languages and helping build the repository for publication. Ariel Martín Pérez expanded language support and improved spacing and kerning.

Lineal by Frank Adebiaye, with the contribution of Anton Moglia, Ariel Martín Pérez. Distributed by velvetyne.fr

A collection of fonts from Velvetyne including; Anthony, Avara, BackOut, Basteleur, CirrusCumulus, Compagnon, Façade, Grotesk, Jgs font, Kaeru Kaeru, Mourier, Ouroboros, PicNic, Pilowlava, TINY, Typefesse, VG5000, Mess, Format 1452, Trickster, Lithops, Lineal, Amdal, Gulax, BianZhiDai, Degheest, Fungal, Karrik, Le Murmure, Outward, Resistance, Sligoil.

The TINY font family was originally created over the summer of 2018 as the visual identity for an experimental retail pop-up shop in Chinatown, New York City called “Today in New York”, or TINY for short. The shop was the result of an intern project at Verdes, a creative agency, between Jack Halten Fahnestock and Théïa Flynn, where they sold T-shirts and tote bags customized on the spot. TINY is based on the smallest type size (using only 5 of the 16 available print heads) of the HandJet EBS-250, the tool used in the shop for immediate printing on textiles. Its variable dot size comes from the HandJet’s adjustable ink output.

TINY 5x3 comes as a variable font with a size axis to modify dot size from 0—300, as well as 15 separate instances (each increasing the dot size by 20 units).

TINY by Jack Halten Fahnestock. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.

Typefesse is a playful butt-shaped typeface in which the letters are rendered in such a way that the reading is done through the folds of the body.

The design of Typefesse is motivated by the surprising combination of two vocabularies, that of the body and that of the alphabet. The drawn alphabet reveals contortionist and playful creatures that either hide inside of it or that expose themselves to it. Is it the letter that defines the bodies' shapes, or is it the other way around? These creatures play with the viewer's gaze and fight against the lettershapes by disturbing their readability with their exuberance. The alphabet is laid bare and readers become spectator-voyeurs in spite of themselves. Typefesse is a typeface that generates a confusion between reading, seeing and spying. It's a titling font, although it has a surprising readability at small body sizes. Its three styles have been named in reference to the moon and its mysteries

Typefesse by Océane Juvin. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.