Your friendly typographic big brother

Named after the city district located where the old Western Gate of Copenhagen used to be, Vesterbro is an attractive new serif face from Black[Foundry]. It is the brainchild of Jérémie Hornus, who developed the type family in collaboration with Alisa Nowak and Ilya Naumoff.

The core design of the Vesterbro family is the Poster weight. The imaginative high-contrast typeface combines characteristics from Scottish and Garalde models. Vesterbro Poster is warmer than most Didot-inspired display faces. It has friendly, organic shapes, with a generous x-height and short serifs. Its tilted axis and supple curves lend Vesterbro Poster an inviting, jovial personality; just look at that radiant smile on the lowercase ‘e,’ or how the ampersand licks the next word.

Surprised at how well this typographic mashup works, the team derived a text version with the same properties. The Regular weight has more pronounced serifs and a fairly low contrast, giving it a calm yet confident look on the page. Leaf terminals on letters like ‘a,’ ‘c,’ and ‘f’ add an elegant calligraphic touch. As the weight increases, the typeface gains impact without losing its supple charm.

Thanks to the multinational team at Black[Foundry], the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets were added early in the development of Vesterbro. The comprehensive character set includes several types of numerals, an extensive ligature set, and a full complement of arrows. Pleasantly readable in text sizes and attention-grabbing when used big, Vesterbro is a versatile type family for global communication that can be applied to any design project, from editorial design and graphic identities to advertising, branding and packaging.