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Yanone Kaffeesatz

Designed by Yanone, Cyreal

About

"Yanone Kaffeesatz" was first published in 2004 and is Yanone’s first ever finished typeface. Its Bold is reminiscent of 1920s coffee house typography, while the rather thin fonts bridge the gap to present times. Lacking self confidence and knowledge about the type scene, Yanone decided to publish the family for free under a Creative Commons License. A decision that should turn out one of the best he ever made. It has been downloaded over 100,000 times to date, and you can witness Kaffeesatz use on German fresh-water gyms, Dubai mall promos and New Zealand McDonalds ads. And of course on coffee and foodstuff packaging and café design around the globe.

In 2009 he reworked much of the typeface and it got published in FontShop’s FontFont Library under the new name FF Kava. You can read more about it in an extensive article by Yves Peters on FontFeed.

Updated in December 2013 with Cyrillic, designed by Sol Matas and Juan Pablo del Peral at Huerta Tipográfica.

To contribute, see github.com/yanone/kaffeesatz.

Designers

Choosing type

When you have some text, how can you choose a typeface? Many people—professional designers included—go through an app’s font menu until we find one we like. But the aim of this Google Fonts Knowledge module is to show that there are many considerations that can improve our type choices. By setting some useful constraints to aid our type selection, we can also develop a critical eye for analyzing type along the way.

Yanone Kaffeesatz - Google Fonts