Jersey; FC Sans Pauli; Amifer Folio
Typography’s back on the menu! We’ve got three fun fonts in today’s edition, each of which was created with real purpose and intention, and executed brilliantly. Unfortunately, only one is immediately usable.
Jersey
The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is Europe’s largest hacker association, active for 40+ years at the intersection of technology and society. It does technical research, runs campaigns/events, gives political advice, operates anonymity and communication services, and coordinates decentralized groups across German-speaking regions. It publishes, engages interested people, promotes “fun with devices,” and follows hacker ethics.
In December of this year, they’re holding their 40th Chaos Communication Congress, dubbed “Model Citizens”. The group encourages active creative participation from attendees and publishes a style guide for the events. This year, the Jersey typeface is featured prominently, so I thought a section on it might be fitting.
Jersey is a “sporty” (Sarah Cadigan-Fried’s — the font’s author — own word), knit-friendly (yes, as in IRL “knitting”) pixel sans. You’ll often see it referenced as “Jersey 10,” and the “10” means capital letters stand 10 stitches tall. As noted, it is built for colorwork knitting (machine or hand) with Regular and Charted companion styles (Charted has the stitch grid baked in).
This TrueType font (it also ships as woff2) was hinted with ttfautohint, and is built on a 75-unit pixel grid, so every outline is an orthogonal block with no curves. With a units-per-em of 1400, that gives a cap height of 750 (ten pixels), an x-height of 600 (eight pixels), an ascender of 1125 (fifteen pixels), and a descender of -375 (five pixels), with zero line gap.
The font contains 363 glyphs and maps 664 codepoints. Spacing is proportional rather than monospaced: advance widths are all multiples of 75 units, ranging from one to seventeen pixels. OpenType features include aalt, case, ccmp, locl, ordn, pnum, and tnum, plus mark positioning (note: there is no kerning table, which makes sense given the intended use case).
Its free to use and modify under SIL OFL 1.1, so — if so moved — go bonkers on the knitting.
FC Sans Pauli
FC Sans Pauli is the house typeface FC St. Pauli commissioned from Hamburg agency Karl Anders and type designer Christoph Koeberlin.
The family is back-slanted, so every word deliberately leans left. While you may initially think that’s just a gimmick, it is designed to follow the club’s politics, and it comes out of the graffiti and tape art from the club’s IRL neighborhood in St. Pauli. The glyph coverage is bonkers extensive — 383 languages and 703 characters.
There is more to the font set than a whimsical display face. In fact, there are thirteen styles, with three workhorses: FC Sans Pauli Bold, which carries the intended attitude into anything the club signs; Copy, an upright version (so long text stays readable); and a Tape variant that keeps a complete character set despite its mangled letterforms, which means you can mix it into straight settings instead of pasting it on as a picture. Then there is the detail work: an anchor ampersand (so, an “Ankersand”?) for the harbor city, an OZ ligature as a nod to the Hamburg graffiti writer, and a gender star that is reachable through an OpenType feature.
The campaign says, “Everyone can use it, and it’s completely free”, and the club’s own announcement says initiatives and organizations can use it if they write to marke@fcstpauli.com. I could not find a download button, a GitHub (et al.) repo, or a CDN webfont (hence no technical breakdown). So, ask, and ye may indeed receive.
A football club deciding to own its letters instead of renting them from a private equity corporation (TIL Futura — the font they used to use — is owned by private equity) is a laudible endeavor. The typeface that came out of it is better designed than most corporate rebrands with ten times the budget.
If you do procure a copy, drop us a note!
Amifer Folio
Shakespeare’s Globe marked the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio by turning decorative editorial ornaments from the 1623 text into a custom typeface. Working with south London studio Typeland, the theatre built Amifer Folio, an all-caps display font drawn from the Folio’s decorative initials and woodcut motifs. It comes in two styles: a simpler Small cut and a denser Big cut for larger sizes. The typeface appears across the summer season’s posters, which tie each play to the natural world through wilderness and tamed-landscape imagery. A cast of peculiar characters—angels, demons, gargoyles—carries over from the original woodcuts.
The project started in-house at the Globe, which selected the ornamental devices that once broke up the Folio’s text. Typeland reworked those elements into a base thematic treatment, then built the bespoke layer font. The main challenge was making intricate patterns work across scales, from small initials to large display type. The resulting letters are filled with floral motifs, birds, and mythical creatures, turning the Folio’s page decoration into a living part of the season’s visual identity.
FIN
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