Alexandra Thornber

High-contrast? High impact? Have Courage? Eye-catching and (extra, extra) bold, Courage balances ultra-high stroke weight, delicate details, and unique letterforms with a self-indulgent passion that will make you feel a little guilty using it. Honestly, use it large and don’t try to force it into a small space, because these fearless letterforms need room to move. Flavored with both upright and italic styles, each font includes an indulgent level of alternates, swashes and titling options, visual elements and more.

A backstory with a different name
Years ago, I was commissioned to take my Lust typeface and produce something unique to use for large format graphics for an event…cool. It needed to be hyper-contrast with a lot of over-the-top details. With a tight turnaround, I looked for primers within my development catalogue to help me, and settled on some early work on a typeface I had drawn called Hedonist. I used those sketches and its conventions to retrofit and build out Lust Hedonist (only to see the project go bust on the client’s end). I intended to go back shortly after the Lust Hedonist release to finalize a retail version of the OG Hedonist, but I never could settle on the look of the ‘g’ or the numerals, got distracted with other projects, and never picked it back up… until last year. After randomly doodling a fat, flat ‘g’ with an extremely tilted counter axis, I knew immediately how it could be used and that (re)set things in motion. Only problem was, in the process of refining the letterforms I began truly dissecting the pieces, rediscovering all of the recklessness within Hedonist, and decided on fundamentally rewriting the approach to the typeface… literally flaying it to the bone. I’m much, much happier with this finished typeface now, but the name no longer fit the moniker given to the first, adolescent approach—there’s far more audacity and cleverness in these letterforms, tenacious in their resolution now. As a result, the name Courage fit the mettle of this typeface so much more, so I kept it.

Arzachel is a humanistic sanserif with a big x-height and a specific organic look. Its design is scientifically sharp and efficient in small type sizes as well as rugged and dramatic in headlines.
Arzachel’s essential feeling comes from several features: all the letters are slightly sloped, stem terminations are flared at the top, and the terminals in letters a, c, e, f… are widening with the inside parts completely flat. The stroke contrast is low in the regular weight while it increases in the black; finally the capitals have an inscriptional flavor. Despite being a sanserif (thus a product of recent typography) Arzachel’s roots stretch back to the Renaissance tradition: Olocco took inspiration from some of the early and rather weird types cut in Venice in the 15th century.
Arzachel was conceived during Olocco’s MA in Reading to provide a companion for his Zenon for use in small type sizes. But instead of expanding the Zenon family with optical sizes, the designer decided on a sans with its own personality rather than a sanserif version of Zenon with chopped-off serifs.

Sole Sans, companion to Sole Serif, is a newspaper sanserif available in a wide range of weights and styles. It’s a workhorse, suitable for headlines, diagrams, graphics and tabular work. Contrast at the junctions between arches and stems is a feature of early 19th-century sanserifs which inspired Sole Sans. It was originally designed for the leading Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 ore.