Soleil

Designed by Wolfgang  Homola . Released 2011.

Who says geometric sans fonts have to be rigid? Wolfgang Homola’s Soleil plays by the rules, but only up to a certain point. With seven weights and italics plus a ‘Magic Caps’ variant inspired by MC Escher, Soleil tips its hat to past masters while looking boldly forward. 

  • Silver 2012 Austrian Joseph Binder Award
  • ISTD 2014
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London’s battle of the balconies.

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The debate about Britain’s future has taken an unexpected new twist: a battle between north London neighbors.

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LONDON (Reuters) – The debate about Britain’s future in the Europe has taken an unexpected new twist: A “battle of the balconies” between north London neighbors unfurling competing pro- and anti-Brexit banners.

Unimpressed by a large “Vote Leave” banner appearing on the balcony next door, a man named by British media as Frank Chalmers, 61, unveiled his own sign that added the words, “…if you want to cut workers’ rights”.

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The leafy, suburban locale was not previously regarded as a key battleground in the debate around the June 23 referendum on Britain’s EU membership. The story emerged after Chalmers’ son, Malcolm tweeted a picture of the opposing balconies and wrote: “My parents’ neighbors have put up a large ‘Vote Leave’ sign. It seems my dad’s response is to get creative. #Remain.” He told the London Evening Standard newspaper that his father gave his neighbors a bottle of wine as a peace offering.

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The Backstory

Soleil

A tranquil and fresh geometric sans font family for clear text and headlines.

In the wrong hands, geometric fonts can be overly procedural, but Wolfgang Homola’s sans serif type family excels at combining the spark of inspiration with mathematical precision. Soleil is an ostensibly geometric type family that cleverly avoids being dogmatic about its geometry.
 
Soleil’s letterforms are the result of a thoughtful design process that brings together simplicity with lively, fluid rhythm, as opposed to rote mathematics. Created for a wayfinding and signage system during a renovation of a 1950s modernist building – the labour office in Vienna – Homola’s design is subtle and refined, and based on a process that involved countless hand sketches before digitisation. Its design includes generous mirrored counters, tall ascenders, slow curves that stress a purposeful mechanic construction and a large x-height for legibility at a distance or in small sizes. Its personality is seen, for example, in the friendly lowercase ‘f’, the perfect curve of the open ‘c’, a narrow ‘s’ and ‘w’, and its three-stroke ‘k’. Upper cases feature rather contemporary horizontal proportions and  obliques  meticulously crafted to match the upright’s advance width to near perfection..
 
Soleil fits a wide range of potential applications: signage and wayfinding systems being the most obvious based on its provenance; book and magazine design; branding and corporate identity programmes.
 
Soleil consists of seven weights with respective italics and a twisting, two-sided MC Escher-like display style called Magic Caps — perfect for branding and merchandising when something eye-catching is required.
 
Soleil underwent an update in the spring of 2026 that added support for Vietnamese and Pinyin notation, as well as variable fonts using the weight axis, in addition to numerous minor improvements. OpenType features allow for the implementation of typographic niceties such as small caps, both tabular and proportional lining and oldstyle figures, ligatures, alternate characters, case-sensitive variants, and fractions. All together, Soleil’s contemporary and pleasing characteristics make it a great choice to replace overused or unpalatable geometric typefaces.


CREDITS

Lead design and concept
Wolfgang Homola

Type Design
Patrycja Walczak

Engineering
Joancarles Casasín
Sonja Stange

Quality assurance
Azza Alameddine
Yorlmar Campos

Kerning
Radek Sidun

Graphic design
Elena Veguillas
Felicia Priscillya

Copywriting
Joshua Farmer

Doug Arellanes

Social media manager
Doug Arellanes