After three months offline Velvetyne is back. This is why
Yes, they are back.
The Velvetyne website was closed since the 05/12/2019, for a bit more than 3 months, for the first time in the typefoundry's 10-year existence. This online strike was not a bug but rather a continuation of the IRL strike which is still alive in France.
"This social movement is a reaction to a reform of the pension system that the French government is trying to impose on the people. We, at Velvetyne, as many of our fellow citizens, consider this reform unclear, useless and unfair. We still don’t understand the motivations of the government behind this reform. The current system isn’t actually facing a long-term deficit" notes VTF aka the Velvetyne Type Foundry which is designing and distributing free and open source typefaces since its creation back in 2010 by Frank Adebiaye as a logical continuation of his blog about typography and type design.
"If we have decided to be on strike for the first time, it’s also because it seems that the social dialogue is stuck in France as in a lot of countries worldwide. Strikes and demonstrations have been an historical part of the democratic dialogue in France for about a century. But our latest governments have started to repress these movements with an automatic violence" writes VTF which is back online for a reason.
"Why did we decide to stop this online strike while the government didn’t even to start to question its reform? Because we decided that we wanted to change our strategy in this battle.... We would like to think that we have encouraged some of you to be aware, or more aware of what’s happening in France. But we would want to articulate a bit more the motivations behind our action. We have decided to re-open because one of our main goals is to offer tools for the world to emancipate and blossom. We hope that, by releasing libre fonts as creative projects envisioned by thoughtful authors, we can give access to “indie typography” for people who would otherwise be deprived of it. We are not naive, we know that we are inevitably part of the market economy and that our fonts are used by capitalist companies as much as by non-profit organizations and students. That’s life, and we are OK to be part of the world."
And there are some changes in this new state of VTF.
"We have decided to make some changes in the way we function" notes Velvetyne. "We are changing our editorial policy in order to decrease the pace of releases for our (libre) consumer goods, as part of an attempt to lower our impact on the world ecosystems. We will also start to publish Non-Font Objects on our website (NFOs?). And we will drastically increase our efforts into welcoming more diversity among the authors that we publish but also among the members of the core of the collective."
"We have decided that the donations we will receive between now and the end of the social protests against this reform will be transferred to a solidarity fund for the French strikers. It is our way of helping French workers to bear these claims longer, without falling into misery."
Welcome VTF here.
Tags/ type design, typefaces, fonts, type foundry, france, open source, velvetyne, frank adebiaye, strike
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