Velvetyne creates first open-source font between a type designer and band

Velvetyne Type Foundry has created the first open-source font made between a type designer and a band. Velvetyne’s co-founder Jérémy Landes has created two typefaces to coincide with Frànçois & the Atlas Mountains’ new album, Solide Mirage.

The project first began when Frànçois asked Jérémy to create a new logo for the band’s upcoming release. “Bodoni typefaces appeared to be an obvious inspiration as it was used in several versions on all the band’s medias,” Jérémy explains. Using this as a starting point the designer decided “to draw a unicase, allowing the band to mix different shape families by stirring lowercases and uppercases together”. This allowed “the caps to remain quite classical, the lowercases show a stronger temperament.”

What developed was a typeface of it’s own. “Solide Mirage began as a squared monospaced typeface, for practical layout reasons, quickly followed by a proportional companion, a more narrow design to allow subtler text layouts,” Jérémy tells It’s Nice That. “Both typefaces have ornamental alternates for the A, O and V, inheriting the zig-zag spirit of the album cover created by the visual artist Tatiana Defraine. A small set of ornaments have been drawn too, widely used in the album leaflet.”

What developed is an elegant serif typeface with a shapely design. During the creative process Frànçois and Jérémy decided that the two Solide Mirage typefaces should be free. “This decision allows the typeface to have its own life, the band’s fans would be able to seize the sensible world conveyed by the album and the fonts altogether. This is quite unique for the music industry and typographic scene to do such thing together. Domino Records, Frànçois’ record label who also represents Animal Collective, Arctic Monkeys and Blood Orange will release the font beside the album.”