About Odile

Odile is inspired by an experimental typeface named Charter, originally designed by the American book and type designer William Addision Dwiggins from 1937 to 1955. It consisted of an informal lowercase alphabet, a narrow, seemingly non-inclined vertical letter with script features, but without joining letterforms. The typeface was never commercially released. Dwiggins’ concept contemplated Charter as the italic or script companion to Arcadia, Experimental No. 221, a roman type to be released by the Linotype Company of New York, where Dwiggins was hired as a type- and design consultant. The Charter project progressed in a sporadic manner, stalled during the second world war and came to a halt in 1955.

My attraction to Charter was sparked by its whimsical look. I was fascinated by its curves and construction and intrigued by the idea of experimenting with an upright italic, a minority in the font roster. Over the course of the project, I became interested in designing a typeface for extended text setting. These combined interests set the goal to create a text type family with variants encompassing and accompanying a reinterpretation of Dwiggins' original Charter. Named Odile, the family was designed in the spirit of our time, not a revival, but bearing in mind a reference to its inspiration. Odile Upright Italic is most directly inspired by Charter. This style naturally defined the design approach and language for most family members. The steep calligraphic upstroke and deep junction in, for example, the lowercase ‘n’, can mostly be accounted for its script appearance. This stylistic detail, best visible in the Upright Italic, diminishes towards the Italic and gets gradually less pronounced in the Regular weight.

Odile's stroke is modulated with a modest thick to thin contrast in a north-south direction alluding to 18th century font approaches. Odile roman weights include OpenType feature-enabled sets to replace the double-storey 'a' to a single-storey one. Overall, this family maintains a generous open texture.

Odile Version 2.0 is further refined in every aspect. The stylistic spectrum is expanded to sixteen weights. The letterforms were brought in tune with the sans companion Elido. Elido's family structure mirrors the one of Odile V2.0.