Most type designers aspire to have their work seen everywhere. They want their fonts to be on every desktop and get picked up by some major political campaign or magazine. I don’t blame them, either—that’s how you get paid.
One designer, though, has other ideas.
Meet Matthieu Salvaggio. The founder of Adele Type Foundry recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to distribute Osmose, his quirky sans-serif face that only 100 people will ever own.
Matthieu is someone who respects hard work and takes pride in the products he creates—it shows in the way he speaks about his “baby” Osmose. He’s limiting the release to only 100 licenses, not because the exclusivity will make it more monetarily valuable, but because he wants the people who buy the font to “cherish it.”
Let’s take a look at what these people will be cherishing:
Matthieu describes Osmose as a “neoclassical sans serif typeface,” with geometric qualities and calligraphic additions.
Osmose reminds me of Calibre by Kris Sowersby, but with more character. Compared to many of the mass-appeal typefaces you see out there, Osmose opts for a mix of styles and a heavy-dose of individual taste—which is fine considering only 100 people need to share the same taste.
The terminals on the r and f are quite sharp. The capital letters are all very wide—noticeably so on letters like P and S. The a is wide and the loop under the g in thin. Looking at the letters themselves, I find it difficult to tell how well they’ll go together, but Matthieu has done an excellent job at connecting the dots. Osmose isn’t perfect for everything—it’s not another Helvetica knock-off. But damn is it perfect for anything that needs an extra dose of character.
Text set in Osmose feels uniform within itself yet completely distinct to other faces.
Back the Kickstarter campaign. (And enter to win a free license below!)
[giveaway id=19697]
