When fonts retire

As part of our latest website redesign and re-publication, we decided to retire 29 typefaces from our catalogue. What does that mean? It means that our catalogue was growing too big for us to apprehend it, and we decided it was time to do some (very late) spring cleaning.

Why did we retire these specific fonts? During the last years, we’ve been re-considering what the Velvetyne editorial line was. And for a long time, it was a sum of a lot of unsaid things, a bit blurry, and not similar between every member of our team. Which is all fine, but not very clear, for us or for others (you). So last summer, during a creative retreat in Lure, we established this list of criteria to release or keep a font in our catalogue:

• The members of the collective and the people submitting a project all agree to respect Velvetyne values and code of conduct and are aligned with it.
• The project is an invitation to collaboration and the font, if existing, is more a way of expressing the concept of the project than a final form.
• The font or tools questions what an opensource/libre font is.
• The projects and/or tools used to make the project can be opensource.
• The project and the font should be different enough from existing project and fonts in our catalogue. We want to be suprised, we don’t want homogeneity.

Listing these criteria helped us figuring that some of the fonts in our catalogue didn’t match much with what Velvetyne was today, all for different reasons. And thus we decided to comb our catalogue through this criteria, with an obvious dose of subjectivity and bad faith on top, in order to decide which fonts we would keep or not. This is not a definitive sort, and some fonts might come back, some new fonts will be released, and some others might sunset one day too. As of everything with Velvetyne, this is a work in progress.

Here is the alphabetical list of all retired typefaces, with a link to where you can still find them. We think people should continue to be able to find them, use them, and even fork them to give them a second life !

• BilboINC by Hélène Marian
• Bizmeud by Jil Daniel and Quentin Bodin
• Blocus by Martin Desinde
• Bluu Next by Jean-Baptiste Morizot
• Boeticher by Charles Pailler
• Cantique by Sébastien Hayez
• Chaumont by Frank Adebiaye
• Commune Nuit Debout by Sébastien Marchal
• Courrrrier by Sébastien Hayez
• Daubenton by Olivier Dolbeau
• Fengardo Neue by Loïc Sander
• Hangul by Sébastien Hayez
• Happy Times at the IKOB by Lucas Le Bihan
• Lack by Adrien Midzic
• Lment by Sébastien Hayez
• Mainz by Frank Adebiaye
• Millimetre by Jérémy Landes
• Minipax by Raphaël Ronot
• Mister Pixel by Christophe Badani
• Mixo by Matthieu Cannavo
• Mono by Frank Adebiaye
• Montchauve by Frank Adebiaye
• Process by Sébastien Hayez
• Runic by Sébastien Hayez
• Saint Jean by so many people
• Savate by Wech (Max Esnée & Hadrien Bulliat)
• Solide Mirage by Jérémy Landes
• Sporting Grotesque by Lucas Le Bihan
• Victorianna by Sébastien Hayez

We would like to personnaly thank all the people (in the list or not) who ever contributed to Velvetyne. You made what Velvetyne is today, even if your fonts are not on the catalogue anymore.

VTF is dead, long live Velvetyne,
and maybe those fonts have a right to an early retirement too ;)