Anvers is a Garamondesque workhorse serif typeface designed for easy readability over long stretches of small text in print and on-screen. The typeface follows in the footsteps of commonly-used printers' typefaces such as Monotype's Plantin and the various Garamond typefaces, among many others, in its wide apertures, chunky letterforms and pursuit of readability. Anvers is currently a roman-only typeface, in regular, semibold and bold weights.
Type design, as a discipline, is obsessed with history, perhaps more so than any other creative field I have ever encountered. Nowhere else have I witnessed the kind of perpetual re-examination of venerated historical figures and influences more than in type. I love it. Anvers, my first published typeface, is my own attempt at the same. I started work on it as an appreciation of the workhorse serif faces of the 19th and 20th centuries; the kind of nameless or unidentifiable fonts which would be used over and over again for book after book, publication after publication, often identified by only the name of the foundry combined with a generic epithet, such as “Roman” or “Pica”. Many of these anonymous typefaces are, in my opinion, woefully under-appreciated. The best of them are absolutely wonderful. They seem sturdy, yet light on their feet; they are at once whimsical and down-to-earth, often wonderfully imaginative and yet still supremely readable. In print, these typefaces are exceptionally comfortable to read, almost worn-in; whether this was a conscious design choice from the start or a by-product of the medium, caused by countless print runs wearing down the sharper edges of the soft lead castings, or even simply the softening effect of low-quality paper and bleed-prone ink, I’m not sure. Nevertheless, this was a quality I aimed to emulate with Anvers. It took me almost two and a half years of continual testing and tweaking to get Anvers to the state it's in now; Anvers has accepted a huge amount of my blood, sweat and tears in the process. Whether that's more a testament to the amount of work the typeface required or an indictment of my own skill as a type designer, I'm not sure, though I can only hope the typeface speaks for me in terms of its quality, and for a first (published) typeface, I'm quite pleased with it, to be honest. It seems like every type designer has described at least one of their typefaces as a "workhorse", and perhaps I'm no different in that regard. Ultimately, though, if this one can stand up to its forebears in terms of its stamina over pages and pages of printed text, I'll be happy.
Anvers can be built locally by running
gftools builder config.yaml
in the sources directory of the project.
Anvers was designed by Ishtar van Looy. Copyright 2024 Ishtar van Looy (ishvanlooy@gmail.com).
This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is in this repo at OFL.txt and is also available with a FAQ at: https://scripts.sil.org/OFL.