Odile’s inspiration came originally from an experimental typeface named ‘Charter’, designed by William Addison Dwiggins around 1936. He designed the lower cases only and the typeface was never commercially released. Charter, informal in its shape, upright and suggestive of script, though the letters were non-joining, was obviously not a book type. I became interested in the forms of the typeface many years ago, and while working on a reinterpretation of it, I became increasingly interested in the challenge of designing a typeface for extended text setting. In combination, this set the goal of creating a text type family with variants encompassing and accompanying a reinterpretation of Dwiggins’ original Charter.

Odile was among the awarded projects in this year’s Swiss design competition, even before its commercial release.

[Odile is pronounced “Oh-deel”]

Version history
V1.0 – Initial release version; 2006.05
V2.0 – Public revision 1 with the addition of 4 new weights: 2010.07

ISO 8859-1
Latin1
Afrikaans, Albanian, Breton, Catalan, Danish, English (UK and US), Faroese, Galician, German, Icelandic, Irish (new orthography), Italian, Kurdish (The Kurdish Unified Alphabet), Latin (basic classical orthography), Leonese, Luxembourgish (basic classical orthography), Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), Occitan, Portuguese (Portuguese and Brazilian), Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Walloon, Basque

ISO 8859-2
Latin2
Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian (when in the Latin script), Slovak, Slovene, Upper Sorbian, and Lower Sorbian.

ISO 8859-3
Latin3
Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish

ISO 8859-4
Latin4
Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Greenlandic, Sami

ISO 8859-9
Latin5
Turkish

ISO 8859-10
Latin6
Nordic languages

Taste Test If you purchase a single weight (or more) of this typeface, then return later to buy the complete family, we will credit you the amount of the original sale.

Kontour End User License Agreement / version 1.5, May 2010

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