TYPEVOLT TYPE FOUNDRY — EST. 2019 — DRAW · SPACE · KERN · PROOF
WE DRAW LETTERS WITH A CHARGE
Typevolt is three type designers and one engineer in a room above a print shop. We have released eight families in seven years, which is slow, and on purpose. Every typeface is named after an electrical unit, because a font is the same thing: a small standard that everything else gets measured in.
We draw the paragraph before the poster. If a face cannot set six hundred words comfortably, it does not get a bold.
Most of a typeface is the white between letters. We spend more hours on spacing than on drawing, and it shows at small sizes.
One release a year, finished. No font we sell has a version number that starts with zero.
Every style is proofed on a laser printer, a risograph and the worst phone screen we can find before it ships.
The house grotesque. Square shoulders, open counters and a lowercase g we redrew forty times. Built for names on doors.
A soft, wide serif with an optical-size axis, so the same family sets a masthead and the footnote under it.
A monospace for people who read code all day. Tall x-height, a slashed zero, and no two characters you can confuse.
Tall and narrow, for headlines that have to fit. It holds its colour from a poster down to a train ticket.
A slab with a workshop manner: sturdy brackets, even colour, and numerals that sit properly in a table.
An interface sans drawn tight for dense screens. It stays legible at eleven pixels and does not shout at forty.
High contrast and unashamed. Hairlines that need size and space, for covers, mastheads and one word on a wall.
The quiet one. A text face for long reading, tested on twelve-hundred-word articles and one four-hundred-page novel.
We tested eleven serifs for the redesign. Ampere was the only one the sub-editors stopped complaining about by Thursday.
Art director — a national Sunday paper
I asked for a custom weight between Medium and Semibold. They said the Medium was already right, and sent proofs to show it. It was.
Design lead — a product studio
The licence is one page and I understood all of it. I have signed software agreements longer than their entire website.
Founder — an independent press
PRINT, LOGOS, STATIC IMAGES — per style, up to five people
SELF-HOSTED WOFF2 — up to 500,000 page views a month
EMBEDDED IN SOFTWARE — or everyone in the company
Full character set · every style · for pitches, coursework and making up your mind