New Additions: July 2025
31st July 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:
Natalie Rauch – Gustine Vaganza (TypeMates)
Gustine Vaganza is an interesting variant of your geometric sans-serif typeface Gustine. What inspired you to design it?
To be honest, I'm not usually a big fan of geometric typefaces. So, as a kind of challenge, when I decided to design a geometric typeface, I aimed for variation, recognition value, and branding. This is why I gave Gustine Vaganza unique, handwritten shapes, to offset the bluntness and lack of character that can be associated with geometric typefaces.
Why did you decide to offer Gustine Vaganza as a separate typeface, rather than include the variations as alternate characters in Gustine?
There are two reasons for this. Firstly, many users still find stylistic sets difficult to handle. They would rather be able to see exactly what the font will look like straight away. Therefore, stylistic sets tend to be overlooked. More importantly, however, Vaganza creates an entirely different typeface to the original, with Gustine becoming something completely independent: Gustine Vaganza! It's not just small details that change: whole new shapes emerge that are not just a stylistic set, but create a completely different typeface.
The character shapes in Gustine Vaganza range from the conventional, like the ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘X’, ‘Z’, ‘m’, and ‘r’, to the distinctly unusual ‘t’, a character shape that I don’t think I’ve seen before; where did the idea for that come from?
I believe that many brands and people are driven by a combination of the familiar and the unusual. People are looking for something special and slightly unconventional, but not overly outrageous. Gustine Vaganza tries to cater to this need. As always, some letters lend themselves better to variation and uniqueness than others. The lowercase ‘t’, for example, has a lot of character and offers something distinctive, much like the lowercase ‘g’. The inspiration for the ‘t’ and many other letters in Gustine Vaganza comes from handwriting and experiments with it, as well as the idea of warmth and natural flow – a recurring theme in my designs.
Did you have any applications in mind when you designed Gustine Vaganza?
I have to admit that I find this challenging every time I create a new design. Rather than having a specific application in mind, I design shapes to convey emotions and values. For Gustine Vaganza, for example, these are playfulness, fluidity, boldness, and familiarity. These can fit into different applications. Designers and users incorporate my shapes and typefaces into a visual context that often aligns with my intended emotional message. However, I love that this is not always the case and that designers use typefaces in unexpected ways. There is beauty in that.
George Triantafyllakos – Sylphus (Atypical)
Sylphus is a beautiful serif typeface with a mystical look to it. What prompted you to design it?
Sylphus is an attempt to design a vertical contrast axis typeface with classic didonesque/bodonesque design traits, but with a twist. The idea originated from a rejected logotype design I made some years ago for olive oil packaging. And since I follow the advice to “don't be afraid to delete, but never forget to save” in my design work, I occasionally revisit old and rejected works for inspiration. So it was time for Sylphus to come to life :-)
Sylphus has several distinctive features such as the arrow-head serifs on the ‘E’ and ‘F’, the joined serifs on letters such as the ‘H’, ‘K’, ‘U’, and ‘X’, and the open dots on the ‘i’ and ‘j’. Were these inspired by other typefaces?
Given that the initial rejected logotype was destined for olive oil packaging the desired traits were elegance, and a specific element reminiscent of olive or oil. The vertical axis and the high contrast were decided to satisfy the elegance part of the equation, while a drop-like ‘e’ was designed for the second part.
When I revisited the logotype and decided to turn it into a complete typeface, these small design decisions gave me the idea and opened the way for an exploration of other little design features that could, first of all, work well this ‘e’ form and, eventually, lead to an overall distinctive look for the typeface. Thus, the open dots came first, the joined serifs next, and the arrow-head bars on ‘E’ and ‘F’ afterwards. I think that all these elements work well together, but of course there are ordinary alternate glyphs for some of these characters that bring the tension down a notch (but make the final result duller, I guess).
You’ve created a variant called Sylphus Phos in which the characters have more rounded shapes, but it also has a distinctively different ‘e’. Why did you decide on that?
The Phos variant was created as a more natural, friendly, less perfect alternative to the initial set. And to make it more distinct I kept the ‘e’ from the initial rejected logotype as the main one to differentiate it a little more (this ‘e’ is also present in Sylphus as well, as an alternate character). I try to do that when I get the chance, since I deeply believe that perfection is a chimera. Especially, in times of AI and social media, with their endless pursuit of perfection, I seek for imperfection and mistakes (whether actual or intentional) to give a more human element to my designs
Did you have any particular applications in mind when you designed Sylphus?
The typeface is definitely destined for display use. I have already used it on two (Greek) book covers and it looks really good. I especially want to promote the Sylphus Mono variant given that there are not many Greek contrasted monospace designs, and I see a rising interest in these in the past decade. Logotypes, packaging, and editorial design in need of elegant traits (but with a twist) are also fields where the type family could fit and work well.
Christoph Koeberlin and Gabriel Richter – Tausend (Fontwerk)
Tausend is a family of four subfamilies (Regular, Soft, Plakat (Poster), and Plakat Soft) in ten weights, together with Stencil and Shaded styles in nine weights. Did you plan this set of families from the outset, or did it grow as you worked on the project?
Tausend Plakat was the heart of the project, but from the outset, the plan was to deliver more than just standard styles. Some ideas were already in place at the start of the project (optical sizes, Shaded as a nod to non-digitized fonts (Schattierte Grotesk), and Stencil as a nod to fonts that are no longer available (AG Book Stencil), and a few more were developed during the joint development process (Soft).
Tausend’s tag line is "A homage. Not a revival”, presumably referring to Akzidenz-Grotesk? Was your objective to design a neutral workhorse grotesque that could follow in Akzidenz-Grotesk’s footsteps?
It should definitely be a modern (yes, we know, it’s a hackneyed term) grotesque typeface that captures the power of Akzidenz-Grotesk. So we don’t want to deny our roots, but in this case we can’t and don’t want to follow in their footsteps. We find it more interesting to explore what a modern homage can be, or how a typeface can become contemporary: responding to today’s viewing habits (architecture of the ‘a’), exploring boundaries (Too Black), using modern technology (variable fonts, especially Stencil), contemporary character set (Latin-M; see Latin Character Sets), etc.
Apart from the different ‘W’ shapes, the differences between the Regular and Plakat styles are quite subtle, especially in the bold. Is your intention for designers to use them like optical sizes?
The basic idea was to interpret the Bold Display Akzidenz-Grotesk in a modern way. This includes spacing and kerning, as well as the ‘W’, less tapering in connections, smaller apertures, narrower accents, spaced mathematical operators, and display punctuation (quotes, ‘@’, ‘*’, ‘™’, ‘®’); see the Tausend Specimen PDF for more details.
Finally, I was interested in how you managed the collaboration between two designers on such a large project, especially in view of the different time zones between Berlin, Germany, and Fukuoka, Japan?
This was actually a huge advantage. Gabriel gave Christoph the latest files every day shortly before work and he did the same 12 hours later. This way, we halved the development time without getting stressed.
Sam Parrett – Hotline (Set Sail Studios)
Hotline is a hand-drawn script font with ink blobs to give it a spontaneous appearance. What gave you the idea of designing it; was it for a particular project?
The idea for Hotline came about when I was experimenting with styles for a realistic liquid-style font. I really enjoy using novel and interesting tools when it comes to drawing and painting letters on real paper, as it can often give you unexpected results, and I had a few different ones I was trying out for this project.
The first was a rubber syringe which I used to squirt out blobs of acrylic paint; this eventually became another one of my fonts called Dripdrop. I also had a masking fluid bottle, which is a fineline needle applicator for watercolour paintings, and while it didn’t quite give me the organic fluidity of the syringe method, I realised it actually made for a really unique pen which contrasted these big blobs of ink with really fine and precise strokes.
So after finishing up my Dripdrop font, I was straight onto the inky script idea, which became this Hotline font. I thought it had a retro signature feel to it, so I reflected that in the name and imagery.
How do you go about designing a font like Hotline? Did you draft the characters on paper first, and then scan them in before digitising them, and if so what sort of materials do you use?
Yes, after experimenting and refining the style, each character is then individually hand drawn onto paper, scanned in, traced to vectors in Adobe Illustrator, and then pasted into FontLab. For drawing the font I used a bottle of Golden High Flow Acrylic paint (carbon black) with the needle applicator applied.
You’ve provided a second font, Hotline Alternate, to allow designers to create more variation in the lettering. Why did you decide to provide these alternates as a separate font, rather then providing them as OpenType alternates?
These days we see fonts being used in so many different types of software, as well as different devices, and offering the alternate set as a separate font essentially just makes it more accessible to everyone. I’m seeing more and more of my customers use Canva as their design tool of choice. It has a huge growing user base of over 170 million, and while it recently added support for ligatures, there still isn’t any way to access a font's stylistic sets.