New Additions: February 2025
28th February 2025
From the hundreds of fonts we add to the Identifont database every month we chose a selection of the most interesting recent additions, and interviewed the designers about their approach to each design:
Fanny Hamelin – Garnier (Proof of Words)
Garnier is an elegant serif text typeface which you’ve described as being based on the work of the 18th century punchcutter Joan Fleischman. What inspired you to design it?
I’ve been thinking about designing a serif typeface for several years now and I found Joan M. Fleischman’s punches particularly appealing. The forked serifs immediately caught my eye and I wanted to try my hand at interpreting them in a slightly different way. I wanted to design a classic easy-to-use working typeface, but at the same time give it a special touch. My last serif typeface was Selva which is very standardised and mechanical, so I wanted to try something completely different.
One of your stated design aims was to fit Garnier to the width and proportions of Times New Roman. This seems an unusual constraint to impose; did you have a particular application in mind that required this?
This adaptation to the Times New Roman width is one of the main constraints of this project. Times New Roman is one of the most widely used typefaces so its proportions are relatively familiar to us, even if when you look at them closely you notice some oddities or inconsistencies. I wanted to impose these widths on the characteristics of a Fleischman type to determine whether this mitigated the historical aspect that this typeface can have, with its very large capitals and expressive lower case. The standardisation of width helped to anchor the typeface in a more contemporary time by erasing the very historical rhythm. The result is a typeface that is more usable today.
A distinctive feature of Garnier is the forked serifs on many of the characters, such as the ‘A’, ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘L’, ‘Z’, ‘2’, and ‘7’. Are these a characteristic of Fleischman’s typefaces?
These forked serifs are in fact one of the main characteristics of Fleischman’s punches and its digitisations. This is obviously one of the details I wanted to conserve and highlight in my design. For example, historically the ‘A’ has no such detail but I wanted to reinforce it and added one, as on the serifs of the ‘C’, ‘G’, and ‘S’. There are also the round carved-in drops in the sources as well as the serifs in the lower case with a slight offset.
The next challenge will be the design of the italics, where I want to retain the rather sharp spirit of Fleischman’s italics while still adapting them to the Times New Roman proportions without having an overly mannered design.
Other digital typefaces based on Fleischman’s type include Fleischman BT and DTL Fleischmann. How does Garnier fit with respect to these earlier examples?
There aren’t many contemporary alternatives to the BT and DTL Fleishman, and none of them really suited me. I wanted to detach myself from the very historical aspect that this typeface can convey by modernising certain design choices and rationalising the shapes. I looked a lot at how the choices had been made in interpreting the sources. I kept some and changed others, and that allowed me to place the cursor where I wanted it adding my own personal touch. I wanted to place myself between these fairly faithful interpretations and Klim Type’s Epicene, which is a very elegant, exuberant, and well-drawn modern translation. I wanted to place myself somewhere more discreet.
Filip Despotovic – SubSans (Out of the Dark)
Where did the idea for the SubSans originate? Was it for a particular project?
I noticed an unusual discrepancy: While booming streaming services invest enormous time and effort in UX and UI, subtitling – which is crucial for the distribution and accessibility of their media – often seems to be limited to default settings, typefaces, and conventions shaped by the cinema tradition.
So as part of my bachelor's thesis and project in 2020 I started to explore this topic in depth. On the one hand, I attempted to develop a typeface inspired by this context; on the other, I had the opportunity to delve into the unfortunately somewhat overlooked genre of humanist grotesque typefaces.
What particular features of SubSans address the requirements for subtitling in film and television?
One of the key characteristics of the typeface is its angled-cut stroke endings which, despite being a striking visual feature, originated from experiments aimed at balancing the typeface’s grey value and rhythm – especially when set against dynamic, busy backgrounds. Additionally, its distinct letterforms ensure good readability with minimal risk of confusion. However, there is room for variation or refinement through a range of stylistic sets, allowing the font to perform well in both print and digital applications, including interface and app design.
Were there any particular fonts that influenced the design of SubSans?
My main references and influences were Adrian Frutiger's directional signage fonts of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Concorde and Alphabet Roissy, the predecessors of Frutiger.
You’ve also provided an italic which isn’t just optically slanted, but has script-style versions for letters such as ‘a’, ’b’, ‘d’, ’e’, ‘p’, and ‘q’? Why did you decide to provide a true italic?
While I aimed to blend humanist typographic influences with rational and sharp qualities in the upright styles, it felt natural to further emphasize and refine the humanist aspect in the italic version. As a result, the italic is designed to feel almost like an independent typeface with its own distinct characteristics, rather than merely an optically slanted variant of the upright style.
Team '77 – Signa Set (Optimo)
Signa Set is a digital version of a typeface originally developed for phototypesetting in the 1970s. What prompted you to revive it as a digital typeface now?
On the one hand it was important to us to make our typeface designs from the 1970s available digitally today, and on the other hand Signa Set ideally complements Optimo's typeface repertoire both historically (Bobst Graphic) and stylistically (humanistic sans serif).
We also think there's a need in the market for a classic, easy-to-read font, for applications with large amounts of text. But also for elegant applications in the display area. Signa Set Regular and Signa Set Italic (with the additional bold variants) in particular could fill this gap in the market.
Did any of the same team work on Signa Set who had originally designed Signa, and if so, was it useful having that connection?
Yes, Erich Gschwind and Christian Mengelt, both from the former Team '77, digitally implemented Signa Set based on the original hand-made drawings.
Signa is a sans-serif font with a calligraphic look to it. When creating glyphs that weren’t originally available in the phototypesetting version did you go back to sketching with ink on paper, or did you work entirely digitally?
We were able to design the necessary additional characters and character variants (such as currency symbols and ligatures, etc) directly digitally.
OpenType digital fonts provide capabilities that weren’t available to phototypesetting, such as contextual alternates. How have you taken advantage of these features to extend Signa Set from what was provided in the phototypesetting version?
We have made slight stylistic changes to individual characters such as ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘p’, ‘q’, and ‘g’, so that different typographical images result in use.
Finally, what does the word “Set” in the name mean?
To distinguish it from other brand names “Signa” used today, the addition of Set (typesetting, typesetter, fontset, setting, etc.) makes the brand clearer as a typographic font.
Benoît Bodhuin – Resum (BB-Bureau)
Resum is a variable font in which the characters are composed of individual elements that expand as the weight increases. What gave you the idea for it?
This idea comes from the desire to make a font with a volume by moving hidden elements. I finally did not develop it because it was too heavy and caused problems on the PDFs. Which finally gave rise to the Harber font.
Here I took up this idea but for a different purpose. Resum is a typeface that plays with resolution, a dot at a time, so the resolution decreases as the fatness increases. To change resolution from the maximum resolution (weight 0) to the minimum (weight 9), one dot out of two doubles in size, and one dot out of two does not change size. Weight 0 (key step 0) is high resolution, weight 3 doubles the size of one dot by 2 (key step 1), weight 6 again (key step 2), and finally weight 9 (key step 3) is black and low resolution. Weights 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 8 are intermediate steps – intermediate resolution – and for this reason very interesting :-)
In addition to the variable font, you’ve provided ten weight instances numbered 0 to 9 and named Light A = 0 and Light B = 1 through to Black A = 8 and Black B = 9. Why did you decide to split the odd and even weights into two sets like this?
This comes from the desire to have two intermediate steps between each key step. Which gives me ten different weights (a lot). This set of names allows me to create two different families of this font and sell the variable font at a reasonable price, equivalent to one of the two families.
The characters in Resum appear to be constructed from overlapping horizontal and vertical sausage shapes that expand as the weight increases, so the characters with just horizontal and vertical strokes such as ‘E’, ‘F’, ‘H’, ‘I’, ‘L’, and ’T’ are smooth, but diagonal and curved strokes are castellated. Is that correct, and was it a goal of your original design?
It's exactly like pixel writing; letters with vertical and horizontal lines are not distorted, unlike letters with curves or diagonals. This is essential to make the resolution change appear.
Are your font ideas the result of a lot of experimentation, or do you have a clear idea for a font and then implement it according to your original concept?
The initial idea of changing the resolution is a clear idea, but it took me a lot of experimentation to figure out how to achieve this, what resolution to start with, and what resolution to end up with (more important).
Did you have applications in mind when you designed Resum?
Yes everything :-) More seriously, at high resolution it is a rounded Grotesk, and at low resolution its shapes result from the concept (that I was aiming for). This typeface is about resolution and can be applied to many things. But in reality, I always prefer to leave this choice to the graphic designer!