Agnes Avdeeva

A sturdy workhorse with the grace of a gazelle, the FF Pastoral typeface family marries pure craftsmanship with rapturous excesses of form. With his fifteenth release under the FontFont brand, prolific French designer Xavier Dupré has filled a typographic toolbox with plentiful options ranging from a tender, feathery Thin to a robust, healthy Black. At a glance, FF Pastoral appears deceptively simple, particularly in the middle weights. That surface serenity is intentional and allows for easy reading and quick comprehension of short blocks of copy. Upon closer inspection, FF Pastoral is complex and nuanced, carrying a balanced tension in its forms. This plays particularly well in magazine spreads and corporate logos, where uniqueness is a virtue. In creating his latest design, Dupré drew inspiration from a tasteful mix of references, combining diverse elements with a deft hand. While its letter shapes were informed by humanist-geometric hybrid Gill Sans, FF Pastoral’s proportions have been optimized for contemporary typography. Slightly condensed but generously spaced, FF Pastoral features a tall x-height, open counters, and subtle, sprightly italics slanted at just 5°. Proportional oldstyle figures are the default in the family, with tabular and lining numbers and fractions accessible through OpenType features. Elegant details evocative of calligraphy judiciously pepper the FF Pastoral glyph set. The ‘e’ bears an oblique crossbar, while the right leg of the ‘K’ and the ‘R’ are insouciantly curved in both the upright and italic variants. Further flourishes appear throughout the italics, notably in the ‘T’ and the ‘Z’, the gloriously looped tail of the ‘G’, and an extraordinary ampersand. Sharp-eyed fans of Dupré’s work may feel like they’re in familiar territory, and they would be right. An early version of FF Pastoral sprang to life in 2017 as Malis, a family in four weights on the heavier side of the spectrum. Over time, Dupré refined his original design, expanding it with four lighter styles and including true italics for all. The lightest weights are ethereal, with exquisitely delicate strokes drawing the eye in and across a line of type. The most substantial styles are tremendous in their power, allowing text to make a deep impression in print or on screen. Fully fleshed out, FF Pastoral works sublimely in a vast array of text and display settings. Dupré sees his latest FontFont offering as a ‘cultural’ typeface, perfect for the pages of an oversized coffee-table book or business communications where warmth and informality will win the day. Born in Aubenas, France (1977), Xavier Dupré is a gifted user of type as well as an award-winning type designer and lettering artist. After training in graphic design in Paris, Dupré studied calligraphy and typography at the Scriptorium de Toulouse. Since releasing FF Parango in 2001, Dupré has published such FontFont classics as the FF Absara and FF Sanuk superfamilies, FF Megano, FF Tartine, and FF Yoga. A designer of Khmer fonts as well as Latin typefaces, Dupré splits his time between Europe and Asia.

Styro is a family of modernist-style stencil fonts. There are eight weights available, ranging in color from Thin through Black. All of the typeface’s weights are virtually monospaced, and with each weight of the family, the outside ‘strokes’ building up the letterforms increase in thickness. Styro’s characters are very condensed, and their design employs a reductionist formal vocabulary. For example, the counter-forms are expressed by thin lines that run inside of the letters, from their tops to their bottoms. These ‘counters’ are optically of the same width as the spaces between each letter. Many of the fonts’ stroke terminals – like those on the top of the ‘a’ or on the bottom of the ‘g’ – are reduced to simple geometric shapes. Diacritic marks take the form of light thin lines, which create a nice degree of contrast with their base letters. This thin-line treatment is also applied to many of the fonts’ punctuation marks. Styro is reminiscent of a series of stencil letters designed at the Bauhaus by Josef Albers, although Styro includes separate shapes for both uppercase and lowercase letters, instead of being a unicameral design. The Styro fonts were developed by Aarya Purohit at Indian Type Foundry, and they are an excellent choice for use in editorial design pieces about modern art and design.

Halvar, a German engineered type system that extends to extremes. With bulky proportions and constructed forms, Halvar is a pragmatic grotesk with the raw charm of an engineer. A type system ready to explore, Halvar has 81 styles, wide to condensed, hairline to black, roman to oblique and then to superslanted, structured into three subfamilies: the wide Breitschrift, regular Mittelschrift and condensed Engschrift. Designed to be as adaptable in application as it is steady in appearance, this spectrum makes Halvar as ideal for complex corporate identity solutions as it is for particular ones. For industrial duties, a stencil display version is also available. Halvar is not only built to be flexible, but technical. Apart from the SuperSlanted, all its font styles are multiplexed—a word in one Halvar’s roman or italic widths will occupy the same space regardless of weight—allowing for fine work in annual reports, interface design, or anywhere space is at a premium and the demands of reflow, rollover and animation need to be considered. With a character set that includes extended Latin, Greek and Cyrillic and supports more than 190 languages, Halvar’s styles have German names and multilingual ambitions. Perfect for cross-market branding. To ensure TypeMates’ usual high standards throughout all glyphs, the Cyrillic and Greek letterforms were developed in consultation with native readers. Needless to say, a font system this comprehensive is shipped with tabular figures, circled highlights, superscripts, as well as fractions. Alternate characters let Halvar toggle between two additional stylistic sets: one plain and functional, another distinct and digital. With manual TrueType hinting and special attention to text styles, a stable x-height, contemporary proportions and a robust design, Halvar is optimised for screen performance and ready to meet any challenge in user interface typography.

Halvar Stencil, an unbreakable industrial typeface Halvar Stencil expands on the Halvar universe by building on its industrial attitude: this German-engineered Schablonenschrift is a typeface for construction sites, power stations, data plates and anything that demands visual impact. Cutting stencils into the letters of Halvar reveals that the typeface is an engineer. With letters parted into circles and rectangles, Halvar Stencil is a practical typeface whose raw character is stabilised with consistency and solid workmanship. With bold weights well-suited to immense and brute uses and light weights that are airy and chic, it has flexibility to match its scale. Unusual amongst stencil typefaces for being constructed for complex and international operations, Halvar Stencil’s multi-script design covers Greek, Latin and Cyrillic, allowing cross market branding. Naturally, a system this comprehensive also comes with tabular figures, superscripts, localised alternates and many other useful OpenType features. Complementing all this, Halvar’s multi-plexed functionality means that designers can lighten and darken text in complex settings without worrying about reflowing text or distorted interfaces. Like Halvar, Halvar Stencil has an absolutely consistent character width across all its weights. Subdivided into an extended Breitschrift with a bold physique, a moderate Mittelschrift and a condensed Engschrift, each stencil subfamily has nine styles ranging from lightweight Hairline to massive Black weights. United in the Halvar Stencil Collection, these three families cover an exceptional range. Please, max the Gap! Havar Stencil is not only available in three widths, it’s shipped with three sizes of stencilling. From the tight MinGap to the loose Maxgap, this ensures that whether Halvar Stencil is applied to a shipping container or the plaque of a hard carry case, it has the right amount of stencilling for the job.