Labore VT
Available Soon via Addition Projects
Labore is a result of asking: to what extent can historical material-based research benefit the creation and production of variable font families?
Labore is a variable font that translates relational and proportional systems found in Renaissance-era foundry type into the contemporary era. It currently has one axis for weight, with two additional axes for slant and optical size in production. It is a unitized font; all characters share widths across styles. This design detail affords users the ability to stylize text without disrupting line lengths. Labore is engineered to support 435 languages that use the Latin script with an extended ‘Omni-Latin’ character set and contains a suite of functional (and fun!) OpenType features.
Labore began during my studies at the Expert class Type Design program at the Plantin Institute for Typography, where I researched the types of Hendrik van den Keere (VDK) at the Museum Plantin Moretus (MPM) in Antwerp, Belgium. I was initially interested in the fact that VDK, unlike his contemporaries, was primarily a typefounder and exclusively worked for the publisher Christophe Plantin during the height of his career and until his untimely death. For Labore, I researched three extreme categories of Van den Keere’s types: texts, displays, and a civilité. The MPM’s profound collection supported my ability to research these styles across a range of sizes and source materials, including punches, matrices, smokeproofs, and printed samples. Each reference was analyzed to identify relations between the glyph’s proportions and stroke relative to body size. The resulting proportional data was translated into a framework to support the creation of a unitized variable font.
Labore VT will be available through Addition Projects soon. It is currently available for use under an opensource agreement via emailed request.
A .pdf specimen is available : here.
Labore is a variable font that translates relational and proportional systems found in Renaissance-era foundry type into the contemporary era. It currently has one axis for weight, with two additional axes for slant and optical size in production. It is a unitized font; all characters share widths across styles. This design detail affords users the ability to stylize text without disrupting line lengths. Labore is engineered to support 435 languages that use the Latin script with an extended ‘Omni-Latin’ character set and contains a suite of functional (and fun!) OpenType features.
Labore began during my studies at the Expert class Type Design program at the Plantin Institute for Typography, where I researched the types of Hendrik van den Keere (VDK) at the Museum Plantin Moretus (MPM) in Antwerp, Belgium. I was initially interested in the fact that VDK, unlike his contemporaries, was primarily a typefounder and exclusively worked for the publisher Christophe Plantin during the height of his career and until his untimely death. For Labore, I researched three extreme categories of Van den Keere’s types: texts, displays, and a civilité. The MPM’s profound collection supported my ability to research these styles across a range of sizes and source materials, including punches, matrices, smokeproofs, and printed samples. Each reference was analyzed to identify relations between the glyph’s proportions and stroke relative to body size. The resulting proportional data was translated into a framework to support the creation of a unitized variable font.
Labore VT will be available through Addition Projects soon. It is currently available for use under an opensource agreement via emailed request.
A .pdf specimen is available : here.
