Introducing Solide Mirage, the world’s first open source font/album

Here is a little inspiring story of music and graphic design. “In the begining, Frànçois asked Jérémy Landes to design a logo for his band. This band, Frànçois And The Atlas Mountains, needed a sign to be used in replacement of their long name tag. Bodoni faces appeared to be an obvious inspiration as it was used in several versions on all the band's medias” explains Velvetyne.

“As the fonts always were set in caps, Jérémy decided to draw a unicase, allowing the band to mix different shape families by stirring lowercase and uppercase together. If the caps remain quite classical, the lowercase show a stronger temperament. All the lowercase that should have ascenders or descenders, as the b, d, p or q are the most surprising, with their compressed shapes and long serifs”.

Solide Mirage “began as a squared monospaced typeface, for practical layout reasons, quickly followed by a proportional companion, a more narrow design to allow subtler text layouts. Both typefaces have ornamental alternates A, O and V inheriting the zig-zag spirit of the album cover created by the visual artist Tatiana Defraine. A small set of ornaments have been drawn too, widely used in the album leaflet. During the creation process, after a lot of talks, both Frànçois and Jérémy decided that the Solide Mirage fonts would be free and open-source”. The decision was meant to allow the typeface to have its own life while the band fans would be able to seize the sensible world conveyed by the album and the fonts altogether.

Solide Mirage, the album, and Solide Mirage, the type family, was released on March 3rd.