Arlette

Designed by Ferran Milan Pilar Cano. Released 2018.

Pilar Cano and Ferran Milan’s Arlette font family expands the sans serif genre. Its curvy nature creates forms with gestural vigour, perfect for branding, editorial, young adult works, and packaging.

Arlette also has a Thai companion in six styles, which includes the full Latin character set.
  • Included in the Yearbook of Type IV
Change Font Settings

Les Années Folles, Paris 1920s

Click to Edit
Change Font Settings

À la fin de la première guerre mondiale, un mouvement d’euphorie et de libération envahit la France.

Click to Edit
Change Font Settings

Parmi les femmes qui ont marqué cette décennie on peut citer Jeanne Bourgeois, alias Mistinguett. Mais la véritable « Reine de Montparnasse » est Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Ernestine Prin), baptisée ainsi par l’artiste japonais Foujita. Elle fut l’égérie de Tout-Paris et artiste animant le quartier pendant les années folles. Elle était l’amante du photographe Man Ray et son modèle favori. Leur histoire d’amour a été immortalisée par leurs œuvres communes telles que la fameuse photographie du Violon d’Ingres où Man Ray la représente en violoncelle érotique. Entre 1925 et 1926, l’Europe a enfin désamorcé la crise économique de la première Guerre en passant à une phase croissance.

Click to Edit

Grâce aux investissements à l’étranger, la France a pu connaitre une hausse rapide de sa production industrielle et son commerce devint excédentaire. Quant à l’Allemagne,elle a été soumise au paiement de très importantes indemnités de guerre, ce qui l’introduit dans un marasme économique au début de la décennie (effondrement de la monnaie et inflation considérable). Mais les énormes prêts consentis par les banques américaines, lui ont permis par la suite de retrouver la croissance. Le Royaume-Uni a aussi été confronté à l’inadaptation de son appareil industriel, désormais obsolète, et n’a pas réussi à retrouver son équilibre économique au cours des années 1920.

Click to Edit

The Backstory

Arlette

A category-expanding sans serif font that’s part experiment and part modern update.

Pilar Cano and Ferran Milan’s Arlette font family is an expansion of the sans serif genre. Every type family that TypeTogether releases endeavours to add something to the category in which the font resides, to inject a jolt of life into a category, or solve a significant problem in an appealing way. Arlette boldly attempts all three.

Pilar and Ferran based Arlette on the fast stroke of one letter from a Roger Excoffon family, but along the way they abandoned that starting point in favour of experimentation. Many sans serifs are like a svelte black dress: functional, beautiful, and the unfussy outfit for a nice evening get-together. The Arlette family isn’t like this. It’s a stunner — an incandescent reimagining of what defines a sans and how it can look.

Arlette explores the boundaries of the sans serif landscape and returns with forms developed from gestural vigour. Thinking of it as “painterly” may at first seem to fit, but it underestimates Arlette’s ability to master an unseen world of countless emotions and physical applications: magazines, branding, editorial, teen and young adult works, book covers, and a host of products and packaging whose content will be amplified with Arlette’s voice. Not only does Arlette use its eight weights plus italics to speak in Latin-based scripts, it is also fluent in Thai and has six weights (hairline through bold) with which it meets that challenge, whether in text or display.

Arlette Thai’s modern nature is seen in two features for the script. One is the decorative Thai characters that are based on original palm leaf manuscripts. Another is a version of the Latin numerals adapted to the height of the script due to their wide use in Thailand. Arlette Thai has been meticulously developed, including contextual kerning to avoid mark clashes.

Arlette’s OpenType capabilities include mathematic and scientific figures, positional forms, pointers, arrows, and oldstyle, lining, and tabular lining numerals. In addition to all this, it’s packed with swashes and swash ligatures in both scripts for enthusiastic typesetting. Because it pushes experimentation without compromising readability, both Arlette Thai and Latin are surprisingly legible in small sizes and arrestingly beautiful when their details can be seen.

CREDITS

Lead Designer
Pilar Cano
Ferran Milan

Engineering
Joancarles Casasín

Quality Assurance
Azza Alameddine

Graphic Designer
Roxane Gataud
Elena Veguillas

Copywriting
Joshua Farmer