A Typographic Margherita

It is common to say that to judge a pizzeria, you should taste the Margherita. It has only very basic ingredients, but when done well, it can be divine. There is nowhere to hide for the Pizzaiolo, and his true talent as well as the quality of the ingredients become obvious. Well, to open my shop, I give you these two typefaces, which at their core, have very basic structures and references (Times & Helvetica). The idea is to start with very strong foundational typefaces from which the type catalog can expand. The Hawaiian pizza with pineapple can come later :)

Going Display

Ok, so now we have this perfectly functional and a little bland starting point. Where to go from there? Just contrast the hell out of it! I’ve always been fascinated by contrast in type design. It just adds spice to everything. And with high contrast comes tight spacing. Now you can set super tight and crisp titles right out of the box!

Going Mono

Monospaced fonts (where every character in the font occupies the same width) are a genre of their own. It is rooted in machines (typewriters, code, etc.) and because of its unique origins, it brings a different tone of voice. Fitting each character in the same width pushes the design to its limits and forces you to find solutions for extremely narrow characters (i, l, r…) and extremely wide characters (M, m, w, @…). For the user, it creates a very nice texture which can be used to set a piece of text apart from the rest of the composition.

Going Mono Display

"Display" and "Mono" are rarely seen together. In fact, they represent two almost opposite typographic concepts that are somehow associated here, creating a sort of typographical Frankenstein... All the letters have the same width, but due to their display nature, they fill every inch of their "cages," desperately trying to break free. This typographic monster is a powerful toolbox that can create striking words or sentences.

Stylistic sets

Thanks to the dblzr Manifesto, all our fonts have a wide set of stylistic sets which can be used to change the type’s tone of voice.

• The Monospace alternates (ss01) will activate all the characters specifically designed for Monospaced variants into the proportional.

• The Optical Size alternates (ss02) will activate all the characters specifically designed for large sizes variants into the normal size variant.

• The Weight alternates (ss03) will activate all the characters specifically designed for Black weights into the lighter weight variant.

• And finally, the Italic alternates (ss04) will activate all the characters specifically designed for Italics into the Romans.

• I’ve always been fascinated by the letter "a," and we love to design this first letter. In fact, it’s often one of the most distinctive letters in the Latin alphabet. So for every font, we’re always creating a second one (ss05) which will immediately change the mood of the font. Change the "a," change the font!

Going back in Time(s)

When Victor Lardent & Stanley Morison designed Times New Roman in 1932, they drew inspiration from the 1930 Monotype classic: Plantin. When I set out to draw a typeface loosely inspired by Times New Roman, ironically, the result borrowed a lot from Plantin. While the "dry" and "default" qualities of Times were the major appeal, Plantin is more historical and brings a nice warm touch. It’s also one of my favorite typefaces for continuous reading.

A rare typeface for continuous reading

When setting type for continuous reading, it is very difficult to distance your typographic palette from a few overused classics (Times, Garamond, Georgia…). And this is because anything that would stand out just a little might distract the reader. You’re indeed walking on a very thin line when you’re designing in that space. 00 Wagram’s core family works just perfectly for continuous reading: it feels familiar yet refreshing.

Going variable

00 Hypertext and 00 Wagram have respectively 48 and 96 static fonts separated into 4 and 8 subfamilies. Yes, that’s a lot, and yes, that can be confusing for the user.

But once packaged into a variable font, all of these fit into one single file! And to access any part of the design space, you can simply use the sliders to navigate the design axis:

• Monospace axis (ranging from proportional to monospaced)
• Optical size axis (ranging from small size to display size)
• Weight axis (ranging from Thin to Black)
• Italic (ranging from Roman to Italic)

And yes, with variable font format, you can access anything in between! But to fully understand this design space, it’s probably easier to just head over to 00 Hypertext Variable and 00 Wagram Variable and slide those sliders!

Try me! 🤗

Hopefully, by now you want to try these fonts for yourself? Well, good news, our fonts are free until they get used in a commercial project (read more about our licensing model here). So please, go ahead and download our complete catalog of fonts, fully functional and free of charge!