Foliant Serif

We all know the running gag: Knowledge is power, France is bacon. But what is knowledge really? If you expect a catchy adage now, we have to disappoint you. This is a type foundry—it’s not up to us to plunge into epistemological definitions.

What we do know, though, is this: knowledge is fundamental to us. It’s at the core of our identity as humans. In spite of any technological development, knowledge work will continue to be an essential part of human activity.

The essential visual expression of knowledge is the written word. Or rather: the typeset word. In this domain, weighty tomes used to be archetypal shelters of knowledge.

A typeface for the tomes of today

We asked ourselves: What does a typeface for knowledge work look today? Big books have lost the monopoly over knowledge. Thus, it can’t be a font exclusively designed for print. What is the contemporary equivalent of a “weighty tome”?

We looked at reports, papers, dossiers, dictionaries, databases, knowledge platforms, education sites, legal texts, and more, both digital and printed, and—of course—books.

Our conclusion: knowledge today needs to be branded. Sounds counterintuitive? It’s not.

Knowledge needs to be branded

Every day, countless sources of information beg for your attention. With the advent of AI and its ubiquitous hallucinations, a large portion of these sources have become unreliable. Therefore, a font for knowledge can’t be purely functional: it needs convey trust and poise. A dash of elegance, too—after all, isn’t it amazing how graceful our brains handle unimaginable streams of neurons? An appropriate font should celebrate this grace. To top it off, it must be neutral enough to suit any industry that knowledge workers thrive in.

With this idea in mind, we set out to create a superfamily that could handle complex information with ease. A superfamily that would be recognizable at first sight but that wouldn’t distract from the content once you start reading. A superfamily for separating signal from noise. A superfamily for structuring knowledge in the tomes of today. Enter Foliant.

Foliant Serif: excellence in immersive reading

Foliant Serif is the text face of this superfamily. A contemporary design with a slightly tilted axis and flat, unbracketed and asymmetrically rectangular serifs, it doesn’t closely follow any historical model, yet it subtly alludes to the origins of Latin letterforms in handwriting.

Foliant Serif excels at body copy and immersive reading. On the page, it makes for an even texture and a pleasant reading flow, with finely adjusted serifs that guide the eyes through the lines like conveyor belts.

A toolbox for professionals, academics, and journalists

With its true italics, small capitals, and numerous figure sets (including tabular, proportional, oldstyle, lining, subscript and superscript) in 5 weights, it offers everything you need for professional, scientific, academic, or journalistic work. The glyph set offers 900+ characters in total, including boxed and circled arrows and numbers for easy structuring of multi-layered information.

As for the aforementioned branding value, we made sure to draw Foliant Serif with clean curves and crisp details that really show in display sizes. While its construction is undoubtedly more complex than that of its sans-serif siblings, Foliant brings an erudite, sophisticated appeal to titles and headlines. The heavier weights pack a punch if you really need to get your message across.

All styles of Foliant Serif work well paired with the corresponding weights of Foliant Sans. They’ll have the same color and similar proportions.

Your typeface—your impact on the world

True: a typeface is just a material. It can never control how technology or society develop. But we can make sure that it’s the right material—for the information that bears important contributions to technology and society. We hope that Foliant can be this material to knowledge workers all around the world.