Adelle Sans Panafrican

The Adelle Sans Panafrican font family, José Scaglione and Veronika Burian’s sans serif, provides a clean and spirited take on the traditional grotesque sans for a major part of the global market: Vietnamese, Latin, and the Latin-based Pan-African languages are included. As is typical with TypeTogether typefaces, the most demanding editorial design problems were taken  into consideration when creating Adelle Sans Extended. The combination of lively character and unobtrusive appearance inherent to grotesque sans serifs make it an utterly versatile tool for every imaginable situation. Whether for branding, signage, or advertising, the keyword behind Adelle Sans Extended’s use is flexibility.

Adelle Sans Extended is available in 7 weights with matching italics, and includes Latin, Vietnamese, and Pan-African Latin. Each of these 14 styles is a perfect counterpart in terms of weight and vertical proportions to its language equivalents. This ensures type families fit harmoniously in the same block of text  and gives a pleasing change of texture when used  at similar point sizes.

To support Pan-African Latin and to ensure coherence in the entire family, consultant Dr Don Osborn compiled a character list that would support all Latin-based languages of Africa. These languages use a wide range of resources to make an efficient notation system for the necessary sounds for every language. For example, the use of floating accents above and below the base characters, the use of phonetic  alphabet glyphs (IPA), the use of Greek letters or Greek derivative shapes, extensive use of connected diacritic marks such as the hook or horn, the use of characters that where originally intended for other purposes (like the florin), and character clusters.

Rooted in the belief that broad language support  is crucial to modern type design, the Extended family is yet another push in TypeTogether’s ongoing multilingual efforts. The naturally clean and spirited shapes of Adelle Sans lend themselves to a graceful translation of the structure of African and Vietnamese alphabets. Careful research and close collaboration with African type expert Don Osborn yielded typographic consistency, legibility, and cultural awareness within the Latin-based African languages, as well as filling the need for quality Pan-African and Vietnamese editorial typefaces.

In addition to the 14 weights, Adelle Sans Extended contains its companion Latin and Vietnamese styles, each of which has been engineered to optically match the proportions of its counterparts. Together, the full Adelle Sans family delivers consistent, flexible, and personable results in multilingual documents and multicultural branding worldwide. Its 1,650 character set includes typographic niceties, small caps, several sets of figures, and support for over 400 languages. It also includes a set of 35 icons specially designed for electronic publications. The complete Adelle Sans family, along with our entire catalogue, has been optimised for today’s varied screen uses.