A schoolbook version of the Work Sans font.

Stroke fonts with no contrast and capital letters only based on diverse pseudo-generic elements for multi-usages.

The Libertinage font-set we developed for the FLOSS+Art book. It was built by copying and pasting parts of Linux Libertine glyphs or simply by all-turning glyphs. There are 27 variations, one for each letter of the Latin alphabet and the ‘Full’ version, containing all modifications.

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.

Sans Guilt MB: Based on a rasterized pdf made with the Monotype Gill Sans delivered with Mac OSX.

Sans Guilt DB: Based on early sketches by Eric Gill

Sans Guilt LB: Based on lead type from Royal College of Arts letterpress workshop.

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.

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.

The VG5000 takes its name from the homonymous computer manufactured by Phillips, released in 1984. Its video processor displays bitmap characters built in a common matrix of 8x10 dots. The modern VG5000 is built on a grid 4 times more detailed, allowing more freedom and imagination of curves, where there were only right angles. The superposition of the new drawing onto the starting matrix sometimes reveals unexpected mixtures. Some right angles have been deliberately preserved as vestiges of the first digital fonts, offering a hybrid final shape. One of the inherited features is the accents that are always placed at the same height, forcing some letters to crash. Many glyphs and pictograms complete the VG5000's original set, including references to VG5000 games and the history of emoji.

VG5000 by Justin Bihan. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.

Pilowlava (sic) was born as an intuitive, fast-paced creative feedback loop in which its creators tried to surprise one another. The result is a typeface that recalls cooled lava flows drawn with a compass. Striving to please both of its parents, Pilowlava seeks a balance between viscous energy and controlled geometry. This geometric approach lies on the shoulders of researches conducted by Swiss designer Armin Hofmann in his Graphic Design Manual edited in 1965. The structures of its glyphs are mostly derived from hand-written dynamics, that feed from both calligraphic and graffiti references. All these sweet inconsistencies produce a vacillating, fluctuating typographic colour, embodied by the almost-mathematical tension of its curves. Under a hardened crust, Pilowlava awaits the smallest temperature rise to recover its viscosity. The alternate shapes of certain letters play out these thermic accidents and raise the temperature of the text.

It takes its name from lava pillows, a natural phenomenon that is produced when lava is expelled by an underwater volcano, or when the lava flows of an emerged volcano encounter a body of water. In contact with the water, the lava flow is so hot that it's coated in a glass film. As it isn't totally cooled down, it transforms into smooth pillows that continue to slowly grow. This way, lava creates tubes and viscous balls that pile up and shape one another, and then they aggregate in puffy clusters that can measure several meters.

Pilowlava by Anton Moglia, Jérémy Landes, with the contribution of Maksym Kobuzan. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.

PicNic is an organic typeface inhabiting a cloud of contextual ligatures and inclusive ligatures, substituting for the midpoint automatically. They are designed mainly for French.

The shapes are inspired by the trajectory of a drop of water on an oilcloth, the shadows of the tree leaves on the fabric lying in the grass, the precise path that the ant takes to the watermelon. They attempt to translate the sensory experience of a picnic among friends.

This typeface will suit for all wild, poetic and bucolic explorers for their most adventurous excursions.

PicNic by Mariel Nils. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.

Anthony is a typeface designed by Sun Young Oh and inspired by the artworks of British sculptor Anthony Caro. The form of this typeface comes from his sculptures that are leaning against each other.

The typeface is packed with alternates for most letters that are pseudo-randomly picked when you write some text.

Anthony by Sun Young Oh. 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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Again another 'experimental' monolinear sans. Enjoy or not.

Gulax by Morgan Gilbert, with the contribution of Anton Moglia. 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.

CirrusCumulus was designed without using curves. it's made-up of different modules inspired by scientific diagrams. CirrusCumulus is also a hybridization of two styles: it has a lineal-style lowercase set, as well as a script-like uppercase set, while some glyphs adopt italic forms which produce unusual combinations, arabesques and ligatures. CirrusCumulus includes a large panel of characters that can be used to draw figures, shapes or patterns, a variable ligature system, and many non-binary and inclusive glyphs.

CirrusCumulus by Clara Sambot. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.

Jgs Font is a font family made as a tribute to Joan G. Stark (a.k.a. jgs, Spunk), pioneer of ASCII art.

This font has been specifically designed to draw ASCII art. Its bitmap look and its shapes accentuate the ambiguity between text and drawing. The 'graphic' properties of the characters have been exaggerated depending on the way ASCII artists use them.

The glyphs that make up Jgs Font can be combined from one character to the next in line or from one line to another. It allows, by association of characters, to produce continuous lines, curves, frames, patterns, levels of gray.

In order to be able to change body size while maintaining these pixel-perfect continuity effects, the family is available in three fonts.

Jgs5 for body text sizes that are a multiple of 10 : 10px, 20px, 30px etc. Jgs7 for body text sizes that are a multiple of 14 : 14px, 28px, 42px etc. Jgs9 for body text sizes that are a multiple of 18 : 18px, 36px, 54px etc.

For better results, the body size and the leading need to have exactly the same value and correspond to the multiples cited above.

Jgs font by Adel Faure. Distributed by velvetyne.fr.