B612
Designed By
Nicolas Chauveau, Thomas Paillot, Jonathan Favre-Lamarine, Jean-Luc Vinot
4 Styles Sans Serif
Letters for
every day.
B612 · Regular
Compare the family in headings, short labels and paragraph text.
4 styles available. Compare the specimens below, or enter your own text.
Download B612 ↓TTF · SIL Open Font License 1.1
Set Your Own Text
Change the style and size to compare the letterforms.
Descend to flight level 120
A Clear Hierarchy
B612 · Regular
Headings, labels and running text.
Departures09:00 →
Before You Travel
The morning service leaves at nine. Tickets are available at the station, and the platform is listed on the departure board. Keep your ticket until the end of the journey.
4 Styles,
One Family
Every available style is shown below in its own font file.
Regular400
Descend to flight level 120
Italic400
Descend to flight level 120
Bold700
Descend to flight level 120
Bold Italic700
Descend to flight level 120
Switch B612 from roman to italic and the line does not move. Our measurement put the italic within 0.1% of the roman’s width, so emphasized words can sit in a table or a status display without shoving the next column along. In a font for aircraft screens that is a handy trait to have.
Airbus started the work in 2010 as research with ENAC, the French civil aviation university, and the Université de Toulouse III, looking for an aeronautical font that would make text on every cockpit screen easier to read and keep the cockpit consistent from display to display. The brief was degraded conditions: isolated terms, map labels, capitals mixed with numbers, waypoint lists, abbreviations. In 2012 Airbus took it to Intactile DESIGN, where Nicolas Chauveau, Thomas Paillot and Jonathan Favre-Lamarine drew it with Jean-Luc Vinot of ENAC, for Laurent Spaggiari in the Airbus Human Factors department.
The letters keep some of the calligraphic logic of humanist type while looking technical, even a little like bitmap type. They also run wide.
The name is borrowed from the imaginary asteroid of the aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Airbus agreed in 2017 to publish the font through Polarsys, an Eclipse Foundation working group, and the project won the Observeur du Design Industry Star in 2018. 4 of its 8 variants are on this page, Regular and Bold with their italics. B612 Mono has the other 4. Would we use it for body text in an article? Probably not. On a dashboard, a timetable or any screen packed with codes and figures, it is hard to fault.
Characters & Figures
592 glyphs reported in the reference style. This selection shows 400 recorded characters.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
0123456789 & @ ? !
View The Recorded Character Selection
The Font Files
Download
B612
4 TTF styles with the accompanying CSS, README and license information.
Download ZIP · 212 KB ↓- Version
- 1.008
- License
- SIL Open Font License 1.1
Install On Your Computer
Extract the ZIP first. On Windows, select the font files and choose Install from the context menu. On macOS, open the files in Font Book and choose Install.
Use On A Website
Keep the font files and the included stylesheet together. Update the stylesheet path to match your project.
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="/fonts/b612/b612.css">
body {
font-family: 'B612', sans-serif;
}Keep the copyright and license notices with redistributed files.
Heading & Body
Compare a larger heading with the same family at reading size.
B612 Heading · B612 Body
Before You Travel
The morning service leaves at nine. Tickets are available at the station, and the platform is listed on the departure board. Keep your ticket until the end of the journey.