New Additions: January 2026
31st January 2026
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:
Malou Verlomme – Quatorze (Double Zero)
Quatorze is a sans-serif family of four styles including Display, Mono, and Mono Display, each in six weights plus italics. Was it designed for a particular project?
Quatorze wasn’t developed for a specific client or commission. It started as a core release within the Double Zero system, with the intention of revisiting the geometric sans serif through a more open, flexible framework. From the beginning, the focus was on building a family that could move easily between different roles – text, display, and more experimental uses – rather than being tied to a single application.
One character that stands out to me in Quatorze is the handwriting-style ‘y’. Why did you decide on this?
The u-shaped ‘y’ brings in a small human gesture within an otherwise very rational structure. It’s a deliberate break from strict geometry, adding a bit of softness and personality. That single irregular detail helps the typeface feel less mechanical, while still fitting naturally into the overall system.
The normal style of Quatorze is a legible geometric sans serif, but Quatorze Display ventures into more expressive territory, with extreme contrast between thick and hairline strokes. What was the inspiration for this?
Quatorze Display grew out of an interest in contemporary graphic experimentation and high-contrast editorial typography. By pushing contrast to an extreme and connecting strokes with very fine hairlines, the design becomes more dramatic and expressive. It’s clearly meant for large sizes, where those tensions and details can really be seen.
Introducing contrast into a typeface that is fundamentally monolinear was also an interesting challenge. In practice, this led to very thin strokes appearing inside the structure of certain letters, such as ‘N’, ‘M’, ‘A’, and ‘E’.
Quatorze Mono Display takes this idea even further, with hairline strokes filling the character width in letters such as ‘I’, ‘J’, ‘f’, ‘r’, and ‘t’. Are the mono styles intended more for design than for programming environments?
The mono styles are rooted in coding and typewriter references, but Quatorze Mono Display deliberately moves away from a purely functional role. Details that might read as serif-like in other contexts are stretched into long, connecting strokes that occupy the full character width. This shifts the monospaced logic into a more experimental space, using its constraints as a graphic tool rather than aiming for comfort in programming or terminal settings.
Why the name Quatorze? Is it your 14th typeface design?
The name “Quatorze” isn’t meant to indicate the number of typefaces produced. Using a number brings in a sense of structure and rationality that matches the system-based approach behind the design. At the same time, the word itself highlights several distinctive letterforms such as ‘Q’, ‘a’, ‘r’, and ‘z’, so that the name helps in showcasing the typeface!
Emmanuel Besse – Sancy Slab (Formagari)
Sancy Slab is a narrow slab-serif typeface with seven weights from thin to extra bold, plus italics. What inspired you to design it?
Both Sancy Slab and its companion Sancy come from the same source of inspiration: a hand-painted metal sign found in a small town in the Auvergne region of central France. This old panel was used to advertise a grocery store, and featured a typeface with slab serifs for the uppercases and a sans model for the lowercase. I found this combination intriguing and beautiful, so I drew a quick draft with this melange of styles.
Moving forward, I rationalised the system and opted for a family with a slab serif and a sans serif variant. The original sign was a slant, so it felt natural to have a Roman and a slanted italic for this family. Together with Hugues Gentile, I extended the weights to provide more material to play with for a commercial release.
To what extent did you aim to design Sancy Slab and Sancy with similar proportions and compatible characteristics?
They are designed to be used together, but not interchangeably. As they are display typefaces, the focus is more on matching the vibe than on strict proportion calculations. They have the same vertical metrics but different widths.
Sancy Slab has many similarities to Clarendon, including bracketed serifs, and ball terminals on letters such as ‘a’, ‘c’, ‘g’, and ‘r’. Was that an influence on its design?
Since my initial source only had a few capitals, I looked at different materials: type specimens ranging from the end of the 19th century to the '80s, as well as vintage graphic design pieces. I found faces in the Deberny & Peignot and Miller & Richard specimens that gave the direction for Sancy Slab (an honourable mention also goes to Theinhardt, American Type Founders and Fann Street). The serifs were flatter than in most Clarendons and less contrasting, while remaining curvy (I didn’t want 90° cut slab serifs, as found in Antique/Egyptian faces).
Petra Dočekalová – PD Donut (Petra-D)
PD Donut is a bit different from some of the other fonts in your foundry, which are closer to handwriting. What inspired you to design it?
Unlike some of my other typefaces, which lean more towards handwriting or gestural drawing, PD Donut emerged from a more architectural way of thinking. Its letterforms (a bold display script) were first intended and created for a large-scale mural in Warsaw, Poland, back in 2022. The main challenge was the format of the wall itself: it was a relatively low but eeextra long brick wall. I wanted the letters to be as wide, compact, and heavy as possible, so they could fill the space effectively and remain readable from a distance, mainly because the lettering contained only a few glyphs and was not very long. My aim was to concentrate as much visual mass as possible within each letter’s bounding box, pushing the stems very close together and creating a dense, dark overall texture.
At first sight PD Donut looks as if it could have been written with a well inked thick brush, but there are subtle hairline gaps that give some characters a three-dimensional appearance; for example, in the ‘F’, ‘H’, ’T’, ‘Y’, and ‘1’. What was the thinking behind these?
The hairline gaps and small triangular cuts in certain characters are entirely intentional and these details function as false ink traps. They subtly break up the heavy strokes, prevent the letterforms from becoming visually clogged, and improve legibility in such a compact, dark design. At the same time, they introduce a slight three-dimensional effect that adds character and depth. This principle is applied consistently across the typeface, including symbols and special characters such as ‘#’, ‘?’, ‘&’, or ‘%’. And to me, it feels like it adds rhythm and speediness into an overall very lazy looking font!
All the typefaces in your recently launched Petra-D foundry are hand drawn. Do you design them by drawing them on paper first, and then digitize them from the drawings, or do you ever work directly on the computer?
Yes, I try to keep hand lettering first. I typically begin by drawing the letterforms on paper, where I can freely explore proportions, rhythm, and the overall texture of the alphabet. Once the concept feels solid, I move on to digitizing and refining the drawings on the computer. While digital tools play an important role in the later stages, starting by hand is essential for me in order to preserve a natural, non-mechanical quality in the final typeface.
But of course there are many decisions involved in digitizing sketches, because even the smallest detail can change the overall look of the final font. To create such black glyphs in Donut there was a lot of computer redrawing of the original letters, so we can say it is more of a computer-drawn script font.
PD Donut has a friendly feel to it which makes it look like it would be ideal for consumer products or childrens' book titles. Did you design it with any particular applications in mind?
It works particularly well where a bold, friendly, chunky character and approachable tone is desirable! The typeface is a simple uppercase script, intentionally stripped of unnecessary complexity and equipped with only a minimal set of OpenType features. I’m curious to see it in real use!
Erkin Karamemet – EK Ultimo (Erkin Karamemet)
Compared to the other typefaces in your foundry EK Ultimo is quite unconventional. What inspired you to design it?
The initial spark came from Upper & Lowercase (U&lc), which I consider one of the most influential typography journals of its time, not only because it promoted type, but also because it treated typography as a playground for experimentation during the phototypesetting era. In spring 2023 I acquired a larger collection of U&lc issues, and while exploring them I discovered Minoru Morita’s typeface Rain Drops. It was one of those moments of instant fascination: I knew immediately I wanted to understand where this kind of form language came from and what it could become today. EK Ultimo grew out of that impulse; it’s essentially about transformation rather than revival, taking familiar, historically readable structures (Didone/Antiqua contrast, proportions, typographic architecture) and reinterpreting them into a new, playful system that still holds together as a functional typeface.
Many characters in EK Ultimo have fully enclosed round, oval, or teardrop-shaped counters. Was that a design constraint you were working to?
Yes, shaping the inner white spaces became a central design principle. One of the key ideas in Rain Drops is the intentional closing and re-shaping of counters, turning existing interior space into a strong graphic statement. In EK Ultimo I took that concept and systematized it across the family: circular, pill-like, and drop-like forms are used to create rhythm, and in certain places the shapes deliberately close in to redefine the counterforms. For me, the counters aren’t just negative space; they’re an active design component that drives the character of the typeface while maintaining readability.
It’s a sign of EK Ultimo's originality that I couldn't find other similar typefaces to compare with it on Identifont. Were you inspired by any earlier typefaces?
There’s a clear historical line behind the project. Rain Drops itself was developed in the mid-1970s and relates closely to Pistilli Roman (Herb Lubalin & John Pistilli, 1964). You can see the connection in the high contrast and proportions, even though Rain Drops pushes the concept into a more experimental direction through its modified internal forms. Ultimo is not a homage in the sense of copying those shapes, but a reinterpretation of the underlying idea: how a classical, extreme-contrast structure can be transformed into something contemporary through abstraction, simplification, and a rethinking of counterspaces. Conceptually, I also relate it to a “Form Follows Fun” mindset (in the spirit of Memphis-era playfulness): creative freedom first, but without sacrificing usability.
What process did you follow in designing EK Ultimo?
A big part of the process was analytical: I broke down the reference forms through direct comparison (alignments, stroke thickness, axis/contrast relationships) and used that understanding as a base for my own decisions. Ultimo currently comes in three weights and puts a strong focus on inner-space modulation; it also includes alternates (for example different dot styles on the ‘i’ and variants for ‘f’ and ‘t’). On a personal level, the project also mattered because I managed to get in touch with Minoru Morita, and that exchange reinforced for me that type is not only form, but also dialogue, respect, and a living archive of ideas.