Savigny began as an offshoot of Le Havre. Le Havre met my design objective of a geometric sans serif with a strong art deco touch. Le Havre’s primary inspiration came from the art deco titling of the 1930’s, and the lower case was just icing. The art of the 1930’s is of particular interest to me, and I love the art deco era and its art, and the simplicity of geometric shapes. I am mostly interested in designing display typefaces. In many ways Le Havre was the exact opposite of another popular insigne offering, Aviano Sans. Le Havre has very high ascenders, a lower case and is very condensed. Aviano Sans has no lowercase and extremely extended capitals.

With the rise of webfonts I began to see Le Havre being used frequently online. It’s short x-height and very tall ascenders made it difficult to read in on screen text settings as it was intended as display type. With this observation, I felt that there is more room for a geometric sans in the insigne catalog. So I set about to design a new geometric sans using the successful skeleton of the Le Havre family.

Although I planned to extend the Le Havre line, the new family is so drastically different I decided on a new name: Savigny. The face evolved and began to take on a few humanist touches. Designed from the very beginning as a webfont, the design is open and pleasing to the eye, with a tall x-height. To optimize it for onscreen settings, the spacing is generous. In addition, it includes extended and condensed members, making it insigne’s first superfamily.

The family includes over 100 OpenType alternate characters. These include several style sets. Some are stemless, others are purely geometric, and in a nod to Savignyís origins, Art Deco titling alternates. Please see the informative .pdf brochure to see these features in action.

OpenType capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of the automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. This family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages. Savigny is a great choice for a professional designer that wants a well rounded typeface family that is ready for the web.