First ideas for the project emerged in the autumn of 2024. At the time, I was doing an internship at a French type design studio. Surrounded by the rich beauty of Paris and looking at typefaces every day, I felt an increasing urge to start working on a new typeface.
Typeface brief can take shape through different processes. In my case, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to work on something experimental, a project that would create a dialogue between historical letterforms and contemporary approaches.
More specifically, I wanted to explore Vyaz, an ornamental writing style derived from Byzantine culture that played a significant role in the history of Ukrainian writing. In terms of character, I was drawn to something sharp, carved, chiseled.
Since 2019, Alphabettes has spent nearly every International Women’s Day doing what it does best: hastily dis-organizing a 24-hour online hangout across timezones and continents with a loose schedule that anyone on the internet was welcome to join. We’d take a virtual type walk around Mumbai with Tanya. We’d join Romina and friends in Mexico City for an 8M March with handlettered signs from her community poster-making workshops. We’d hear cool conference stories from Theresa in San Francisco. We’d chit chat in Spanish for an hour with Laura and Dafne and Caro. We’d say hi to pets and babies and make breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, all at once. In 2026? Instead of hanging out, some of us decided we’re hangingin. Or maybe, hanging on. We’re still here, but for now, it’s ok to hang up the internet for the day or hang out in other ways.
This International Women’s Day, I’ll be helping to bring a very hot soup to simmer. After two years of non-stop planning, writing, editing, organizing, emailing, type pairing, proofreading, and spreadsheeting, Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type, heads off to the printer very (very!) soon, after every tiny error has been uncovered in these 400 beautiful pages (🤞). Hang tight!
Tiny Grotesk is a tiny superfamily. In a market where sans-serif families quickly grow to contain dozens of styles, sometimes over a hundred, Tiny Grotesk is an antidote, a proposal to do more with less. It covers as much ground as possible, across only twenty-four carefully selected styles.
Tiny Grotesk is in its regular width a clean, friendly neogrotesk with relaxed capitals and a round, even-keeled lowercase. The two accompanying widths, Narrow and Wide, expand it into a complex typographic toolkit. The Narrow styles, space-saving and optimised for small use, are ideal for footnotes, asides and UI elements. The Wide styles, imposing and optimised for large use, demand space, and will take that space no matter what. This pairing makes the family versatile and broadly usable while remaining as compact as possible.
Tiny Grotesk has been in development since 2019, slowly but steadily expanding in scope but not really in size. It has been used in a few print projects, on some vinyl records, and for a complex digital catalogue before its release in 2024 and expansion in 2026.
Bridging some 500 years of typographic ideas
The initial idea for the family started in a perhaps weird place: 1500s italic calligraphy and movable typefaces based on it. In these early days, the lowercase was a cursive italic. The capitals, however, were upright forms. Since the capital letters in these texts occurred relatively rarely – an average of something like once every forty characters – their presence clearly wasn’t disruptive to readers. Not disruptive enough to feel the need to draw italic capitals, which would require a whole new set of sorts to be drawn, cut and cast. I can’t blame them for wanting to be efficient.
Arrighi’s second italic, as used in Marco Girolamo Vida’s Scacchia Ludus, 1527.1
The italics by Ludovico Arrighi were the original inspiration for Tiny Grotesk, in a direct but not entirely obvious way. The proportions were taken from his second italic, and I wanted to explore them in depth. Would the typographic rhythm work in a sans-serif jacket, even with the strange width relationship between these capitals and lowercase letters?
Let’s enjoy a look back at the headers featured here on Alphabettes.org in 2025:
Hespera (wip) typeface by Muk Monsalve — January 1 · @mukmonsalve Typeface Don’t (wip) by Raven Mo — January 15 · @ravenmodesign Thai, Crushual Italic by Boom Promphan S. · @boom.type Arabic F37 Morta by Shaqa Bovand — February 15 · @shaqabovand Georgian by Ana Sanikidze — March 1 · @wickedletters Lettering by Brooke Hull — March 15 · @brookehull_designs Aksan by Yaprak Buse Çağlar — April 1 @typolea Rubina Typeface by Lora Shtirkova — April 15 · @loraincolors Devanagari (WIP) by Lipi Raval — May 1 · @lipi.xyz Hangul (WIP) by Joohee Lee — May 15 · @jooo.h CMM Coda by Anna Cairns — June 1 · @a____cairns Sumprat by Anne-Dauphine Borione (Daytona Mess) — June 15 · @daytonamess.otf Palestine Still Bleeds — “Alphabettes” in Arabic by Omaima Dajani — July 1 · @omaima_dajani Gustine Extra by Natalie Rauch — July 15 · @natalierauch Vietnamese by Đông Trúc — August 1 · @do_ngtruc Betania Patmos by Carolina Giovagnoli — August 15 · @laranadg Party lettering by Carine Vadet-Perrot — September 1 · @carinevadetperrot For the Flowers Crushed with Bombs — Alphabettes in Arabic by Maryam Golpayegani — September 15 · @golpayegani.maryam Loew Next Devanagari by Amélie Bonet — October 1 · @ameacute Vietnamese lettering by Xindha Yaeger — October 18 · @designedbyxin Shariit by Nada Abdallah — November 1 · @nadabdalla Mabuhay Display by Clara Cayosa — November 15 · @clarasees Epitafio (in progress) by Mónica Rodiño — December 1 · @mrodinho
Thank you to Muk Monsalve & Amy Papaelias for keeping the headers flowing all year long. And endless thanks to our community and to all the incredible designers who shared their work with us this year.
We warmly welcome submissions of type and lettering in all scripts, translations, and transliterations for the Alphabettes header. In-progress work, new releases, old things you found in your Desktop > DesktopGarbage > desktop folder. Reach out via our contact page.
