New Additions: September 2026
30th September 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:
David Quay – Foundry Kingdom (The Foundry Types)
You’ve described Foundry Kingdom as a working typeface for the people. What do you mean by that, and what prompted you to embark on its design?
My only childhood hero was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, born in 1806, who was one of the greatest Victorian engineers. Unfortunately, he worked himself to death at the age of 53. I have always wanted to design a typeface that reflected his character; I think a Grotesque does that admirably well. He was a hard worker and Grotesques are hard-working typefaces. Foundry Kingdom is my homage to him; hence the name.
Grotesques were always the workhorse of the jobbing printer. Along with Egyptians, from which they were developed, they had more impact than serif types on posters and flyers. In the early 19th century, poster advertising exploded; new, bolder typefaces were needed; sans-serif letterforms burgeoned in the 1820s and 1830s. Grotesques were not refined or elegant, not the King's horse at Ascot, but the drayman’s horse hauling beer barrels or pulling the plough. A Grotesque would never be used on a royal wedding invitation; that would be reserved for an elegant script! Foundry Kingdom is The Foundry Types’ interpretation of that early industrial period without losing its quintessentially English and robust qualities.
In your press release you’ve written that you have been working on Foundry Kingdom for three years. I think many font users would be surprised at how long it can take to design a typeface family. What aspect of the design involves the most time?
Looking at my sketchbooks, I have drawings that go back at least 20 years. I have photographed vernacular lettering and signs in the environment for many years, especially sans-serifs. These photographs inspired me, gave me ideas, and helped define the design. Three years ago, alongside Stuart de Rozario, we felt confident that we had a unique enough design to start digitising; that took three years.
From when we started the process of putting the design into production, many glyph iterations evolved, and further development sketches and refinements took place. The font mastering stages, quality control checks, and final font testing can take a fair amount of time if you’re diligent. We have many different projects concurrently and sometimes things get put to one side, “put on the back burner”.
Although Foundry Kingdom is primarily a legible sans-serif typeface for text, it has many interesting details: for example, the tapered ‘G’ spur, the curly ‘Q’ tail, the slightly slanted ‘t’, the hook-shaped ‘f’ and ‘r’, and the curved ‘j’, ‘t’, and ‘y’ tails. These details are retained through all the weights. What inspired these features?
The idea of a tapered ‘G’ with the spur comes from a photograph taken of an incised sign, from 1864, at a disused Blackfriars Station on Blackfriars Bridge Road. There are two alternative ‘G’s; the first is from the Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar, which Brunel designed. These letters are from 1859, the year of Brunel’s death. The second alternative is a standard ‘G’ with a horizontal crossbar.
Swiss Helvetica, German Akzidenz-Grotesk, and many modern-day variants have a low contrast, appearing almost monoline and neutral in appearance. Foundry Kingdom has more character and contrast. Because of the contrast, the terminals on ‘f’ and ‘r’, and the curved ‘j’, ‘t’, and ‘y’ tails have a slight flare. Granby and the Grotesques of Stevenson Blake do the same; I emphasised that as a design feature without overdoing it. The ‘Q’ was my own invention.
In addition to the usual OpenType features, Foundry Kingdom includes positive or negative circled figures, and vertical fractions (also called “nut fractions”); are there any other interesting hidden features?
There are many alternative characters and ligatures, but a grotesque is a pragmatic and utilitarian typeface; I wanted to keep it simple. We did add the daggers and the asterisk to look as if they were borrowed from another font, something printers did when they ran out of sorts.
Felipe Sanzana - Suspiria (Latinotype)
Suspiria is a grotesque sans serif in eight weights. What motivated you to design it?
The idea came up during conversations and experimentation with Latinotype’s type team. We had been mainly focused on developing more traditional sans-serif fonts, and one day at the office, while looking through historical books and specimens, we came across some old grotesques that had a lot of character and really interesting curves. Later, the idea evolved into exploring just how grotesque a typeface could become in terms of its terminal treatment. That’s how we came up with the idea of a grotesque so open that it could almost meet itself, as it does in the black weight.
The black weight of Suspiria is very dense, and in some characters such as the ‘G’, ‘S’, ‘a’, ‘e’, and ‘s’ the strokes actually touch, giving text an imposing feeling. Was this an aspect of the design that you planned from the outset?
The idea was to explore how far we could push the terminals by exaggerating that feature. Rather than looking for wide openings, what we did was close the terminals while, at the same time, expanding the strokes along their path. Instead of keeping a monolinear stroke, it gradually widens. That progressive closing is what allowed the strokes to meet in the black weight. Adding contrast and defining wide proportions was also part of making the system coherent. Finally, that exploration and stylistic curiosity helped define the typeface’s most distinctive features.
The closest typeface I can find on Identifont to compare to Suspiria is Neue Helvetica Extended, but Suspiria has several features that give it a distinctive character: the long bar on the ‘J’, the extended ‘Q’ tail, the elongated dots on the ‘i’ and ‘j’, the leaning ‘!’, and the flat topped ‘&’. What was the inspiration for these features?
Helvetica is always a reference, since it’s fundamental when designing a sans serif, and it also lives in our subconscious as type designers. However, for Suspiria, it wasn’t one of the typefaces we actually consulted. We focused mainly on grotesques by Berthold and William Thorowgood as references, since we have some very good historical material in the office. From there, we gave those references a contemporary approach through Latinotype’s rigor and the editorial decisions we made as a team.
You've written that Suspiria is built for headlines, identities, and graphic systems; did you design it with commercial publishing and product marketing applications in mind?
Suspiria can cover a wide range of uses, although, being such a characterful typeface, we focused on graphic systems with a dynamic approach that need to stand out through its strongly distinctive features. As a starting point, it can work within the areas the graphic design team explores in the specimens: sports, wellness, fintech (or economy), leisure, fashion, and editorial.
Kourosh Beigpour and Delve Withrington – Afzoon (Delve Fonts)
Afzoon is a bold, unconventional, decorative typeface that is nevertheless surprisingly readable. Did you design it for a particular project?
Kourosh: Not for a specific project, but like many similar projects, I had a particular function in mind. A few years ago, while photographing Persian-language signage in Los Angeles, my attention was drawn to a digital advertising sign. The way it worked was actually similar to Latin: all the characters were contained within a defined space, like a block, as we see in English fonts. And, of course, the design was very poor; it was basically just a series of lights that turned on and off.
That was where the idea occurred to me that it might be possible to design a typeface that was readable, yet highly curved and visually engaging, for digital spaces with a fixed width. Gradually, I worked on the sketches until I arrived at the final form of the letters.
I understand that you designed Afzoon to support several different scripts, including Arabic-script languages. Did you design the characters in one script first, and then use these as the basis for the other scripts, or did you work from a set of design principles that were independent of any particular script?
Delve: Kourosh invited me to design a companion Latin set for Afzoon. Fortunately, I have a modest amount of experience designing for the Arabic script from my days at Monotype, and an Arabic calligraphy workshop with Mamoun Sakkal. That experience afforded me an understanding of Kourosh’s rationale in constructing his letterforms for Afzoon. I knew it was crucial to approach designing the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic sets in a manner that both complemented and blended with the Arabic set.
Afzoon is fairly unique among typefaces in that most of the lower-case characters are actually wider than their upper-case counterparts. Was that a design decision, or is it a consequence of its multi-script support?
Great observation David! It was primarily a design decision that allowed me to interrogate the proportions of Latin forms (following Kourosh’s lead as he did that with Arabic), while also embracing Afzoon’s gestalt and matching its rhythm. There were a few edits I made later on in production to accommodate tricky spacing requirements and preserve its overall color.