A collection of fonts from OSP including; work-avec, sans-guilt, reglo, libertinage, fluxisch-else, din, crickx, belgica-belgika, alfphabet

OSP Mill has been created for engraving building instructions into the wood of a bench.

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 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.

Fluxisch Else is an experiment, a first attempt to escape the post ’80 era of geometrical purity that is so typical of Postscript vector based font drawing. The shapes of Fluxisch Else were obtained from scanning printed textpages that were optically composed by cheap phototypesetting machines in the sixties and seventies. Some of Fluxisch Else beautiful features are: round angles, floating baselines, erratic kerning.

More precisely in this case, George Maciunas of the Fluxus group used an IBM composer (probably a Selectric typewriter) for most of his own work, and as a former designer, for all Fluxus work. In the 1988 book ‘Fluxus Codex’, kindly given to Pierre Huyghebaert by Sylvie Eyberg, the body text is typeset in a charmingly rounded and dancing Fluxisch that seems to smile playfully at its dry swiss creator. As if it was really tempted, trying to provide a beautiful warm up to this old modernist classical.

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

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.

A schoolbook version of the Work Sans font.

Reglo is a font so tough that you can seriously mistreat it. The font was designed by Sebastien Sanfilippo in autumn 2009 and is used for Radio Panik identity.

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.

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.

Karrik is rooted in vernacular typography. The weight disadjustments, the lack of optical corrections, the uneven width of the letters are some of the features of early sans serif typefaces that inspired us in this boundless “reinterpretation.” We kept these features noticeable at display font sizes — but with the constraint that the typeface remains legible at body copy size. A set of random, chaotic uppercase letters—accessible with the stylistic set “SS01”–has been added as tribute to the roots of Karrik; uneven garage letterings, nameless fonts of obscure and discontinued foundries.

Karrik by Jean-Baptiste Morizot, Lucas Le Bihan. 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.

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

The Ouroboros or uroborus is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Ouroboros is also a font for alchemists, witches, heretics, outsiders and curious people in general. It's inspired by early art-nouveau styles, which were sometimes used in relation with magical themes and symbolism, so it comes together with a set of alchemical and astronomical symbols.

Ouroboros by Ariel Martín Pérez, with the contribution of H·Alix Sanyas. 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Inspired by humanist typefaces such as Albertus, BackOut has a decidely African design. Its name comes from the eponymous song by Bob Marley and The Wailers.

The 2.0 version of BackOut is a faithful review of Frank's original with improved spacing and kerning, corrected contrast, new lowercase letters and extended language support and functionalities. In October 2022, the 2.1 version was released, with revised kerning and some minor modifications.

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