Vollkorn

Say it “Follkorn”. The word is German for wholemeal, and Friedrich Althausen picked it as a nod to Brotschrift, bread type, the old name for the small everyday fonts of the hand-setting era. That is the ambition here, a quiet, modest text face for bread-and-butter work.

It was Althausen’s first typeface. He first published it in 2005, people downloaded it thousands of times and put it into web and print projects of all kinds, and it came to Google Fonts in 2010. In May 2020 he rebuilt it as a variable font with a weight axis in both roman and italic.

What sets it apart from most text serifs is the serifs themselves, dark and meaty where tradition would make them light, which gives a page of Vollkorn a bouncing, well-fed look. That darkness is why it also holds up in a headline.

What the files carry

12 styles, from Regular at 400 to Black at 900, each with an italic. Greek and Cyrillic come along with an extended Latin, 1,242 characters in all. The italic is a good deal narrower than the roman, around 14% across a line, so it saves space in a caption as well as marking emphasis. Small caps, old style and lining figures in both tabular and proportional widths, fractions, a slashed zero and 9 stylistic sets give a book designer most of what a book needs. Our pick for a novel would be Regular with old style figures switched on.