Occupant Font’s latest release, Carp, is a new iteration on the top-heavy humanist sans-serif, most famously popularized by Excoffon’s Antique Olive and reinterpreted by many type designers over time.

Like many of Excoffon’s other typefaces, Antique Olive contains energetic curves. It most notably features an asymmetric weight distribution with the top parts of the letter being heavier than the bottoms. (The original working name for Carp was Caper, the olive’s petite sibling in a family of asymmetrically round pickles.) Along with a high x-height (even for contemporary standards,) Antique Olive’s bouncy shapes create a distinct expressive flare.

Given this, Excoffon’s original motivation behind the typeface, described in “Antique Olive, La Lisibilité Avant Tout,” may seem surprising. Antique Olive was his personal pursuit of redefining “legible” typography. His tenets for this new approach to type design was that the letter shapes be “functional and not decorative” and “at the service of reading comfort.” Antique Olive’s characteristic weight distribution was not intended for decorative purposes, but to provide momentum in the reading direction and help form coalesced “word blocks” and emphasize salient parts of the letter that characterizes it:

Les graisses placées dans le sens de la lecture, tendent à former le bloc-mot d’une part et d’autre part à attirer l’attention sur les parties saillantes du mot qui le caractérise.

Studies have indeed demonstrated that the top half of letterforms are more critical to reading than the bottom half. But regardless of how we might evaluate the success of Excoffon’s “legibility” intentions, I was drawn to his motivations: his interest in facilitating reading. In this sense, Carp is an interpretation not only of a top-heavy approach to a humanist sans-serif, but an interpretation to making highly functional typography while maintaining character.

In a contemporary environment, making the typeface more functional inevitably meant to streamline some distinctive details (such simplifying the intersection of the a), but more importantly, to have the ability to adapt to different contexts. The Carp family, available as a variable font, is designed to be used across optical sizes and tones. It is “at the service of reading” with both versatility and flare.

While a font family usually contains styles that hold the same personality, black and ultra weights tend to be exaggerations of the regular weight. Carp fully embraces this transformation, where the medium–lighter weights are more monolinear and neutral; the bold–black variants showcase the vertical asymmetry more loudly and have higher contrast overall. The italics also feature more abrupt contrast at the intersections, with smoother rounds, providing more momentum.

With an additional width axis, the most condensed and widest forms perform as a display; on the other hand, the normal width and weight range allows Carp to behave as a textface. Open Type features such as small caps, oldstyle figures, case-sensitive punctuation, and footnotes enable its use as a textface, including alternate glyphs for variations in tone.

One of the challenges of creating different expressions in the poles of a design is to determine what happens in the middle: while the intermediate master often requires adjustments, this was especially the case for Carp, where the top-heavy weight balance of the medium weight was designed to be more subtle, but still active.

The result is a versatile typeface that is both functional but expressively casual, suitable for both print and web.

You can read more about the origins of the typeface and the explore the type specimen on melrosegreene.online.

Like all Occupant Fonts releases, Carp is available for print, web, applications, and ePub licensing on Type Network. Webfonts may be tested free for thirty days.