Maybe you’ve noticed that our website has been times to times down in the last months. We have since discovered that we had DDos problems. That means that our server receives too many visits and requests, either from your computer or from bots. TL; DR: We identified that AI agents (Hello Claude, etc.) are scrapping Velvetyne too many times by minutes, as much as 500000 requests per day. Another tech crap is destroying internet now.

We’re not alone, “Open Street map has been disrupted… “1 by 100 000 scrapers. Nowadays Ai bots are an huge source of web traffic 2 , it remains that 51% of the internet traffic is due to bot activity, and 37% are malicious bots. Ai can be used to exploit vulnerabilities of a website to train on hijacking user accounts and exfiltrate data. 3

Last year we’ve notice firsts attacks on the In Use forms. We saw our server capacity getting overwhelmed by recursive jpg file generation. We suppressed the form to stop this. But since few month their is another threat. We’ve got visited by more Ip address than our server can stand for, up to 30 000 different IPs per days.

Clearly we’re come from a time where the web was an place for handcrafted website. We trying our best to provide an access to our fonts for human and not for bots. We are currently testing different barriers between bots and our url. We are fighting bots but are still searching for Neo! (Nerd Alert)

We are pleased to announce our new initiative: a call for projects. Submit you type-related project to us, get a 1800€ tuition and get your project released on Velvetyne when it’s done! Submissions close on the 15th of May 2025.

To know all about our call, the conditions and what you need for applying, download our call document, in English, or in French.

And don’t hesitate to share it around, we’re more than open for anyone to apply!

Credits:
Call for Project header image created by Mariel Nils.

At Velvetyne, we’re all about promoting a more ethical approach to libre typography. We believe in respecting creators’ consent and celebrating the diverse range of voices in this creative space. We’re aware of the historical importance of our catalogue and our visibility, but we’re definitely not looking to monopolise anything. That’s why we’re constantly tinkering with new ideas, like crafting a new website, retiring certain typeface families, and figuring out what the SIL OFL license really means for us and our community. We are also taking into account feedback concerning the overuse of our typefaces by many students and colleagues, which encourages us to continue our efforts to promote a diversity of libre initiatives.

It is with this conviction that we maintain a list of historic, inspiring and cherished free foundries. You can find this collection just below. Please feel free to rummage through it, share it. That list being open-source, you can also contribute by submitting additions and changes.

What is better, to be surrounded by friends ?

Velvetyne Libre Friends

More than a mere website redesign, the V3 version provides the collective with an opportunity to delve into Velvetyne’s core values. Focusing on our strengths, we aimed to share what we do the best while navigating the economic constraints inherent in a non-profit project, as we work as volunteers. Rather than starting from scratch, we built upon the extensive content gathered from years in V2, including font pages, specimen styles, articles, and In Use images that have contributed to the fonts’ presence in the visual landscape.

In addition to economic constraints, we desired a more restrained visual, technical, and structural approach for the new website. We aimed to add less and remove more, emphasizing simplicity. This article summarizes the technical and contextual aspects of the work undertaken.

Keeping What Works

We retained Processwire, a CMS we use since 2015 for its quality, frequent updates, community support, and compatibility with our shared technical knowledge. The familiarity with its languages (HTML, PHP) contributed to a collective knowledge base. We are very happy to keep on working with this CMS that can grow with us smoothly, and we want to thank every person who helped with issues such as back-end generated SVGs, repeater autofill, form tricks, and other weird custom PHP hooks.

Lighter: Server, Client, and Environment Side

In the initial days of V3, we focused on removing a significant amount of code from V2. All stylesheets were moved to trash, and 90% of the PHP templates were rewritten. Due to the accumulation of updates from various members, patches here and there, the code had become cumbersome, undocumented, and inconsistent. This cleanup presented an opportunity to develop improved code, featuring a better structure, frequent comments, and compatibility with the implicit common “style” shared by Velvetyne members interested in web development.

Removed:

• CSS compiler (Stylus)
• jQuery (finally)
• Most JavaScript functions and libraries
• Images to load on the home page
• Various useless folders on the server

Changed:

• Server host (from OVH to Alwaysdata)
• Announcement system
• Font version system, simplified for editors
• The structure of the About pages and sub-pages, which was a bit too complex for visitors

Added:

• 10 lines of basic CSS classes declare for nested layouts (containers, divisions…)
• A New font! (details below)
• The home page now displays static SVGs generated from the fonts each time a font page is updated. This eliminates the need to load each of our font files on the fly, client-side.
• A simple system that displays translated content only when it exists, able to embrace our exceptional bilingual content
• A RSS feed to invite people to follow us with this standard, slow, non-toxic technology

Graphic Choices

Recognizing the challenges of design decisions within a collective, a single member (I, Raphaël Bastide) undertook both development and design foundations. A minimalist, intentional design approach was adopted, featuring a purposefully present menu, an RSS feed, and layout choices ranging from justified to centered, grid to off-grid, paying homage to early web aesthetics.

I accepted to take on this role, and even though the work was lengthy and occasionally challenging, I still believe it was a good decision to make the website’s release a reality. Making design choices in the name of the collective posed a bit of a challenge for me, but by communicating my progress step by step and informing others about the process, I opened the door to suggestions and comments. This greatly assisted me in embracing this demanding task. The collective provided me with both freedom and confidence to proceed in this direction. Velvetyne, in this context, was akin to any other (kind) client.

The two Velvetyne members, Mariel Nils and Manon Van der Borght, volunteered to create the font used on the V3 website: Velvelyne. This font emerged from rough iterations of a fork of Liberation Sans Narrow, which were transformed using a font-to-skeleton tool called Skelefont. Allow me a few words on Skelefont: In spring 2023, I approached Benjamin Dumond to develop an open-source Python script to automate something I used to do manually: Skelefont transforms any font into a skeleton, applies a given stroke width, and generates a new font version from it within minutes. The resulting characters are no-contrast, dry-then-weighted version of the original, that is sometimes challenging to even recognize. Skelefont is still in development, we will talk a little bit more about it when Velvelyne will be officially released here.

In the hands of Mariel and Manon, our font Velvelyne evolved from this rugged creature into an elegant, usable character, proudly acknowledging its roots in the structure of Liberation Sans Narrow and the tough diet imposed by the Skelefont program. The first time I tested this font on the web pages, I knew it was one of the most impactful design choices throughout the entire process. Velvelyne brought something that was missing, V3 had a soul.

The outcome of collaboration

Spring-cleaning efforts were made collectively to think and process the retirement of some of our historic typefaces. Additionally, every member of the collective contributed by rectifying texts, translations, documentation, and crafting custom specimens for each font page.

In the end, I come to realize that this website was a collaboration from first drafts to release. This project developed through its dedicated discussion channel over more than… 1 year, (oops) ; Yet, working within constraints is where creativity can truly flourish, and our constraints — economy, time, collaboration — morphed into a distinctive signature for our website, a crucial tool showcasing the world the production of our collaborators, of which we are immensely proud.

I want to thank everyone for their support, special thanks to Mia Riezebos for her help for various dev difficulties. I genuinely hope this new website will lead a vibrant existence, displaying the great content we host, and evolving as it has in the past. The bass line is set; now, let’s kick off the party!

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 ;)

Discover Imago Mundi Mei!

Imago Mundi Mei is a free workshop that will have as its goal the graphic research of two little-known techniques: typometry and psychogeography. It’s proposed by the Velvetyne Type Foundry as a part of the Fanzines! festival and in partnership with the Maison du Libre et des Communs.

During this workshop, we will create together typographic characters in a square format which, placed side by side (typometry) will allow us to draw emotional, conceptual, psychological landscapes (psychogeography).

Participants are asked to bring their laptop computers so we can work on them.

Where and when

The workshop will take place at La Paillasse (226 Rue Saint-Denis, 75002 Paris, Strasbourg-Saint-Denis metro station) the 8th and 9th june 2019.

Signing up

To sign up for the workshop, please write us a mail at : contact@velvetyne.fr (the workshop is limited to 20 people, please tell us if ever you can’t no longer come and you wish to give your place).

Workshop program

Saturday 8th june :

9h30 : Reception of the participants, coffee, tea.

10h o’clock : Introduction to the workshop’s goals, slideshow about the history of typometry and of psychogeography. 

10h45 : Distribution of post-its and brainstorming in order to choose the concepts/symbols that we’ll develop through the workshop.

12h30 : Overview of the first sketches. Lunch time.

13h30 : Back to production!

17h : Exhibition of the first drawings, distribution of work for the next day, general joy.

Sunday 9th june :

10h : Quick presentation about drawing type characters on screen. 

11h : Finishing the drawings on paper of the characters, begining of the vector versions for some of them.

12h30 :  Lunch time.

14h : Set up of the character library, file sharing, preparation of the final digital version of the characters. Design of a small publication (zine) that would act as a user’s guide (if the remaining time allows for it).

18h - 21h : aperitif, exhibition of the results, typo/psychogeographic maps everywhere.

The typeface produced during the workshop will be freely distributed afterwards as an open-source font.

Cheers!

Download Imago Mundi Mei!

Between the 3rd to 6th of November 2020, Velvetyne, represented this time by Océane Juvin and Jérémy Landes, was organizing an online workshop for the students of Hyperwerk, at the Basel art school.

Inspired by a term taken from Anja Kaiser’s “Undisciplined Tools” exhibition which took place at le Signe, French national graphic design centre, this workshop welcoming students from various disciplines and experiences aimed to make a first step in the type design world through this recurring question for Velvetyne: producing shapes, yes, but what for? As a matter of fact, de-normalizing the typographic signs is at the heart of what we are trying to do with Velvetyne.

What can be seen as type? Rhythm, modules, legibility and textures are the 4 principal notions we dealt with along these 4 intense days to explore the grey zone between representation and abstraction, legibility and intelligibility, meaning and non-meaning, transparency and opacity. Visual presentation dealing with this different subjects, specific technical type design briefings, individual discussion times and group debriefings were rhythming this week.

The inspirational images gathered by the participants

Starting from one (random) image chosen by each participant, they extracted from it a series of shapes that they fuelled into textures and rhythms. Those abstract text rhythms slowly mutated in order to get closer to some sort of legibility. A topspinner, a lake, some moss, a moving body, faces trapped in screens, a Ghanaian stool, a corner of sky between two buildings then became alibis to appropriate and write with the movement, fluidity, frustration of pleasure felt by each participant. Each of them therefore created their own asemic* writing (* litterally “meaningless”, a writing not conveying any signification).

Those unidentified signs then have been reduced and cut into modules. Their essential or recurring features have been pointed out and extracted. After having been introduced to a modular approach to type design prototyping, the participants mixed the DNA of their respective rhythms with the one of the Latin alphabet. Each of them was able to observe and incorporate the wanted dose of legibility into their typeface. The unfinished but highly personal hybrid fonts obtained were used as a first step into the type design world without complexes.

A particular focus was put on allowing everyone to pursue their most personal research. The participants were accompanied into developing research/work methodologies adapted to their own project. Twisting their tools and methods till rupture allowed surprising results but moreover to explore the room available to manoeuvre and leave the  paths predefined by the tools builders.

We would like to warmly thank Cheyenne, Lucie, Glenn, Sarah, Melanie, Michelle, Sebastian, Alex, Janis, Rebecca, Anne-Louise, Sophie to have shown enthusiam and inventivity during these 4 days. Thanks also to Catherine and Ernesto for the invitation and the help in the organization of this workshop.

A 2-day workshop organized with the École National des Arts Décoratifs and La Générale around the theme of the resistance. The aim was to create a font supporting the incoming exhibition communication. We worked with the students with open-source softwares to achieve this goal. Learn more on the project’s page (in french).

Download Résistance

I am Adel Faure, ASCII artist operating within the Mistigris and Textmode Friends collectives. I’ve been generously invited by Velvetyne to publish Jgs Font on their foundry. Jgs Font is a typeface that I’ve created as a tribute to artist Joan G. Stark and that I use to make ASCII art (see specimen).

In this article I contextualize what ASCII art is, who Joan G. Stark is, what could be seen as a “history of text mode arts”, what does ASCII Art means today, and what are the characteristics of the Jgs font.

I’d like to sincerely thank Heikki Lotvonen for sharing two iconographic references with me (The Printer’s Grammar, John Smith, 1755 and Improvisation, late 18th century) as well as for his text ASCII art : From a Commodity Into an Obscurity, that helped me greatly.

I’d also like to thank Raphaël Bastide, Ève Gauthier and Vincent Maillard for helping me review and finish this text.

Last but not least, many thanks to Ariel Martín Pérez for his proofreading and and for the English translation of this text.

Good read!

What is ASCII Art?

It isn’t that simple to explain what ASCII Art means. More than defining a well established practice, ASCII Art blurs the habitual distinction between image and text, in the art world, and between “graphic interface” and “text mode,” in the informatics domain.

Strictly speaking, the expression designates pictures composed by using the 128 characters contained in the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (shortened as ASCII). Even if the terms “Text Art” or “Textmode Art” are also used, “ASCII Art” or just “ASCII” has become a way of naming all pictures produced with the help of typographic elements. In 1999, in The History of ASCII (text) Art, Joan G. Stark describes ASCII in the following way:

They are “non-graphical graphics”. Its palette is limited to the symbols and characters that you have available to you on your computer keyboard. [1]

Joan G. Stark, A.K.A. jgs or Spunk, is probably the most popular and prolific ASCII artist of the 1990s and the ’00s, who left a strong imprint on online amateur practices and aesthetics. Stark started making ASCII art in 1995 as part of the <alt.ascii-art> newsgroup on USENET. Being passionate about folklore and popular art, she devoted herself to represent in a “line style” way (that could be seen as close to the “ligne claire” style in comics) countless mythological creatures, animals, landscape elements, objects and scenes of everyday life. She published the totality of her drawings as well as texts about ASCII, its practice and its history, on her website www.ascii-art.com. Even if the website is no longer online, it can be accessed through many links like this one..

Her definition of ASCII as “non-graphical graphics” plays with the ambiguity of the English word “graphic”, which either means a figurative object or an element of a graphic interface. At the time of Stark’s phrase, the first digital social networks (Usenet, BBS, Minitel, Ceefax, etc.), still very popular back then, worked in “text mode”. They present user interfaces where the screen is divided in a grid in which each case can display a single glyph. As these interfaces disappeared in favor of graphic interfaces, Stark underlines with irony the ambiguous status of ASCII art: the presence of graphic elements in text environments becomes this oddity that is ASCII.

Even as she embraces its complexity, Stark summarizes the practice of ASCII to something very simple: it’s a way of drawing with what a computer keyboard provides. “Its palette is limited to the symbols and characters that you have available to you on your computer keyboard.” Based on this statement, one can only imagine that each system associated with a keyboard would produce a different ASCII. That’s the reason we can find terms like PETSCII associated with the Commodore PET/CBM, ANSI with the BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), ATASCII with Atari, Shift-JIS with the Katakana mode of Japanese keyboards, Teletext with Videotext (Prestel, Minitel). In this galaxy, the expression “ASCII” refers more specifically to the Amiga styles (oldschool and newschool), or the Usenet styles (line-style and solid-style). Each one of these ASCII have their own scene, with their groups, their artists and sometimes even their own publishing platform.

• www.asciiarena.se - Amiga ASCII
• www.16colo.rs - ANSI
• www.csdb.dk - PETSCII
• www.teletextart.co.uk - Teletext

Some examples 

In the same way that each system can have their own specific ASCII art, each style has their own origin, practice and history.

The PETSCII character set, designed mainly by Chuck Peddle, the designer of the Commodore PET, and by Leonard Tramiel, son of the Commodore founder, includes patterns and geometrical shapes, which facilitates the creation of games on a text mode-only system.

In ASCII art : From a Commodity Into an Obscurity, Heikki Lotvonen recalls the social role of ASCII art in the emerging ANSI scene. Users who were not hackers but who were skilled in ASCII art could obtain access to the contents of pirate BBS in exchange for their illustrations.[^2]

As it’s very simple to reproduce and to modify it (by copy and paste), ASCII was the preferred way to display memes on the first forum networks, notably visible in the immense archive of www.asciiartfarts.com (archived) (which unfortunately contains numerous examples of homophobic, misogynistic and/or racist content).

Certain popular internet characters come specifically from ASCII art. That’s the case, for instance, of “Kuma” (later known as Pedobear) and of “Domo”, of which the particular shape and positions have their origin on SHIFT-JIS shared on 2chan.

A history of text-mode arts

In the late ’00s, Unicode became the international standard for the digital encoding of characters. As its name suggests, Unicode has the objective of comprising the totality of character encoding modes, therefore rendering obsolete the technical particularities of former techniques associated with ASCII, ANSI, ATASCII, PETSCII, SHIFT-JIS, etc. Even if the emulation of older OS and the strict application of their standards constitutes a significant part of the practices within the contemporary ASCII scenes, it is clear for many artists that ASCII art is a notion that needs to be extended beyond the technical specificities of particular machines. Some of them prefer to use the notion of “Textmode art”, as the name of the group “Texmode Friends” suggests.

This attitude reinforces once again Stark’s approach to ASCII art as a practice that isn’t solely based on the use of a particular encoding system but rather on the possibility to create art with shapes that stem from the mechanization of text.

This way, beyond the digital realm, everywhere and each time mechanized text provides constraints, we can find a specific form of art in the shape of text mode, ASCII art.

In Neither Good, Neither Good, Fast, Nor Cheap: Challenges of Early Arabic Letterpress Printing, Hala Auji describes how printers of the first printing presses of the Middle East bypassed the limits of lead composition in order to produce ornaments.

Les manuscrits, par exemple, comportaient des enluminures, à la manière de frontispices, appelés sarlawh ou ’unwan. Ces derniers, souvent très élaborés, étaient colorés et dorés à la main, afin d’indiquer le début de chaque livre et des chapitres suivants […]. Pour rappeler ces motifs dans leurs livres imprimés, les employés de cette presse ont utilisé divers types d’ornements, ainsi que des signes de ponctuation, reproduisant de manière créative des compositions similaires.

Manuscripts, for example, used illumination devices, akin to frontispieces and headpieces, called a sarlawh or ’unwan. These were often elaborately hand-colored and gilded, to indicate the start of each book and its subsequent chapters […]. To recall these elaborate designs in their printed books, employees at this press creatively employed varied ornamental sorts, as well as punctuation marks, to create similar compositions.[3]

This way of subverting the art of typographic composition in order to produce images isn’t rare in the field of printing with movable lead type, which became a necessity when there were missing pieces and turned into a hobby for passionate employees.

Such are the shifts which sometimes are made, where neither Cuts nor Flowers are provided, to dress the first page of a Work : and therefore a double rule is often used ; the rather, because it takes off the trouble of making up Head-pieces without proper Sorts.

An improvised illustration created by Alfred P. Fluhr, an apprentice with the Martin B. Brown Company, New York city, is reproduced. The design was constructed with parenthesis and rules in a playful mood during spare moments. A little experimenting of this kind during odd moments may help constructive ability, but the fad should not be permitted to develop into a habit. Practical composition will be of more benefit to a boy who aims to attain distinction as a job-printer.

Certain printers, such as Albert Schiller, who chose to specifically exploit these kinds of methods to produce art works, were in some way the ASCII artists of their time.

Is ASCII art a relic from the past?

In the same way that the popularization of graphic interfaces and the arrival of Unicode could have sent ASCII art to oblivion, the personal computer could have made typewriter drawing disappear. Yet the practice of the latter continues to be revisited. Below this paragraph there’s an extract from «Bob Neill’s book of typewriter» where images composed with a typewriter are accompanied with the protocol that would allow reproducing them, either by hand or by using a typewriter. This book, published some mere years before the rapid decline and the almost-complete disappearance of typewriter use, replaced by computer keyboards and by text treatment programs, confirms in a way the survival of the typewriter medium before it was actually rendered obsolete.

The popularity of the artist James Cook is a good contemporary example of this survival. Cook, however far from the digital practice, proposes to us typewriter artworks made “en plein air”, directly done in front of the model, even outdoors, in the manner of a traditional painter.

Through the long history of the mechanization of text, despite the sense of obsolescence that stems from innovation processes, ASCII arts have allowed numerous forgotten machines, deemed as useless, to reemerge. They have revealed formal and cultural particularities that are impossible to replace. A manner, in some way to prove that a technical mean can never be truly reduced to impertinence or nostalgia.

The lure of ASCII art might not be in the nostalgia of how it looks, but what it represents: the ideals of «cyberspace». It stands for a wistful longing for those pre-internet days when corporations hadn’t yet taken control of our digital day-to-day and the community was still in control of organising itself.[4]

Jgs Font : a free monospaced font designed for ASCII art. A tribute to Joan G. Stark, ASCII art pioneer

The visual aspect of text-based artworks is highly dependent on the font used. That’s why ASCII art is a highly typographic matter.

The most popular fonts used by ASCII artists are mainly those that come by default with legacy systems.

This is the case of Monaco and Menlo, which have long been the default monospaced fonts integrated into macOS, associated with ASCII line-style. An emblematic example is MS PGothic, the eternal font of SHIFT-JIS practices, the first Microsoft font to include “CJK characters”, i.e. the inclusion of encoding tables for the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages.

While being very inspired by Stark’s work, which draws in ASCII using Microsoft fonts such as Courirer from FixedSys, I started ASCII art using a Truetype adaptation of TopazPlus, a Commodore 64 font. This adaptation is part of the Multi Platform Fonts In Amiga Aspect project by the TrueSchool ascii group published in 2009. It contains vector versions of the most popular fonts used in the Amiga scene. Most of these fonts are themselves created by artists from the Amiga scene, such as P0T-NOoDLE by Leo “Nudel” Davidson or MicroKnight, whose author is unknown

TopazPlus, like most Amiga fonts, has slash and anti-slash glyphs that join character to character and line to line. This feature is at the heart of the famous BASIC command “10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10”, producing an infinite labyrinth.

I was very impressed by this feature, finding in it the resolution of the continuity effect I was looking for as an ASCII artist. So I started working on a font in which all the glyphs would be as close as possible to this effect.

This is the principle behind the Jgs font. Its bitmap appearance and shapes accentuate the ambiguity between text and drawing. The graphic properties of the characters have been exaggerated according to the way ASCII artists use them.

The glyphs that make up Jgs Font can be combined, sometimes in every direction. It allows, by association of characters, to produce continuous lines, curves, frames, patterns, levels of gray.

When glyphs don’t combine directly, their shape is designed so that they can match from afar.

The Jgs font comes with the ASCII and Latin-1 Supplement encoding tables, as well as the glyphs found in code page 437, used for ANSI art.

To conclude, you should know that this font is under free license. You are therefore authorized to download it, share it and even modify it, as long as you credit its origin. I hope you’ll draw lots of cool things!

1. What is ASCII art ?, Joan G. Stark, 1998

2. ASCII art: From a Commodity Into an Obscurity, Heikki Lotvonen, 2022

3. Neither Good, Fast, Nor Cheap: Challenges of Early Arabic Letterpress Printing, Hala Auji, 2017

4. ASCII art: From a Commodity Into an Obscurity, Heikki Lotvonen, 2022

Eric Mourier, Danish graphic designer, b. 1939, who was trained as a lithographer in 1961 at Den Grafiske Højskole (from 2008, The Danish School of Media and Journalism), specializing in graphic design. He then taught at the school between 1966 and 1981, and set up his own design studio with his wife Mette Mourier. Together the pair produced some of the best Danish book designs. They work in a traditional, typographic style with much attention to every detail. They have worked on almost every kind of design assignment, from post stamps to comprehensive, illustrated books. They are the authors of several educational books about book design from traditional offset printing and typesetting to layout and design on a screen. Their book “Book design. Layout and design of illustrated books” was updated and reprinted in 2013 and remains one of the most thorough and pedagogical Danish books about book design.

The revival of the Mourier typeface is a human journey. Sébastien Hayez, one of our first type designers, is also a book collector. In the pages of New Alphabets A to Z, published by Herbert Spencer (also publisher of the magazine Typographica), appears one of the first uses of Mourier. No explanation are printed but the whole casting of this book is a dream team of experimental modernism type design: Tom Carnase, Bob Gill, Wim Crouwel, William Sandberg, Derek Birdsall, Armin Hoffman, Ivan Chermayeff & Tomas Geismar, Wolff Olins, and Alan Fletcher. The Mourier Typeface seems to appear as the most radical type design of the book; its geometry shows a methodical construction and a preference for rational solutions (learn more about the type process here).

Creating the Mourier type was a personal project which took a new dimension when the designer asked Danish writer Knud Holten to write a poem “The Myth about the bird B” in 1970 (learn more about this aspect here). The booklet, bound as a leporello, became the only use of the type: type specimen, piece of experimental literature, a design utopia.

If the design revival was an easy task, finding the contact of his creator was something else. Thanks to the help of Frank Adebiaye, we found the contact of a Danish book publisher, working closely with Eric Mourier, who shared his e-mail.

While designing the original booklet, Eric Mourier explained “The letters have been transferred to film, cut apart, and mounted separately on self-adhesive foil, page by page.”.

In an e-mail addressed in 2011, his enthusiasm was vivid:
“It was wonderful and exciting to have the opportunity to set text with my own font! I am very satisfied with the outcome. It is absolutely perfect.”

Beyonce used the type on some of her merchandising in September 2020. Mourier reaction was precious:
“It was really a big surprise. Think that you should experience that your alphabet should appear in such a context. It’s really amusing, and of course it has attracted attention in the family and among colleagues.”

The Velvetyne team hope Eric Mourier’s memory will be still alive thanks to his work.

Our thoughts are with his wife Mette, his family, his relatives and all those who had the chance to cross his path.