About the author
Visual & Motion Designer at Fontfabric Type Foundry
read moreStep into the world of Calleo, a contemporary sans-serif that’s a perfect blend of flexibility and modern design. Started by our Creative Director Plamen and later brought to life with the expertise of Léon Hugues and Léo Guibert, Calleo is much more than just a typeface. It’s a typographic experiment which pushes the boundaries of our imagination.
At Fontfabric Type Foundry, our journey is rooted in exploring and expanding the frontiers of typography. Our creative collaborations, evident in typefaces like Muller Next, Gismo, Auge, and Grima, reflect our dedication to unique and compelling ideas. Today, we turn the spotlight on Calleo, a shining example of our ongoing commitment to blending creativity and practicality.
Sketches of Calleo show a journey of evolution.
Unveiling Calleo’s Dual Character
Calleo is a modern and versatile sans-serif font family that offers a fresh and contemporary approach to typography. It comprises two subfamilies: Calleo Sans and Calleo Flux.
Calleo Sans is clean and approachable, making it suitable for a wide variety of applications. With nine different weights and italics, it gives designers the freedom to create legible and functional designs, for everything from minute details to bold headlines. The clear lines and welcoming nature of Calleo Sans, best demonstrated in the soft rounded contours of capital letters like B, P, D, and R, make it a versatile choice for any project.
On the other hand, Calleo Flux ventures into uncharted design territories with its unique and unorthodox forms. It explores intricate shapes and ideas, offering a dynamic alternative to the more traditional Calleo Sans. Like Calleo Sans, Calleo Flux also comes in nine weights and italics.
Experience Calleo’s Flexibility
What sets Calleo apart is its versatility and flexibility. The Calleo font family is equipped with OpenType features, including tabular numbers, localizations, and fractions. It goes a step further by offering a single variable font that combines both Calleo Sans and Calleo Flux, allowing designers to experiment with different weights and widths in a single font file. This exceptional flexibility opens up a world of creative possibilities for any project.
Explore Calleo Today
Behind the Font: The Minds that Crafted Calleo
Get to know the creative minds behind Calleo – Plamen Motev, Léon Hugues, and Léo Guibert. Plamen conceptualized the font family back in 2017, laying the foundation for its versatile character. Léon contributed his unique design vision, adding an avant-garde touch with Calleo Flux. Lastly, Léo played a crucial role in the font’s production and the development of the Variable font.
Interview:
Can you introduce yourself?
Plamen: “I am Plamen – Creative and Operational Director at Fontfabric. I help the good ideas visualize into functional and sometimes quite crazy typefaces.”
Leon: “I’m Léon, a French and British Typedesigner, working freelance for about a year I’ve joined the NaN.xyz team since the end of 2022. I’ve published a few fonts with BlazeType, Positype and work my way through SEA Fonts at The Fontpad. I also have an obsession for Script Handwritten fonts.”
Leo: “My name is Léo Guibert, I am a French type designer. I graduated in 2020 from EsadType post-graduate course and in 2018 from the MFA Type Design (DSAA) in École Estienne in Paris. Now, I work as an independent type designer / font engineer.”
What inspired you to create Calleo, and how did you come up with the idea for its unique subfamilies?
Plamen: “Calleo started as a response to the rising wave of neutral geometric sans serif out there. I wanted to make something that looks unique, welcoming and inviting. Calleo become your friendly neighbour who can help you in any situation and has this amazing alter ego Flux that shines and just cannot be missed.”
Leon: “Calleo started as a “Usual” Sans Serif, the idea was to play with it using variable parameters, I wanted for the variable axis to be much more than weight/width/slant.”
Leo: “I joined the project at a later stage and worked on its production aspect once the core idea was already set. I mostly focused on optimizing / extending the design and especially make the Flux subfamily (the one with the crossing construction) working as variable font. “
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced during the font creation process?
Plamen: “The whole process of conceptualizing the idea, planning and executing it. When you look at the typeface you see a font family with two different identities, yet they work harmoniously because every step of the creation was carefully thought through in order to share the same construction, proportions and logic.”
Leon: “Having everything compatible for the variable to work well was at first very challenging. But the most challenging was to find shapes that could move smoothly when animated, the idea of Calleo was to be a truely useful variable font, not each shape have their extremas drawn, but the challenge lies in what’s happening in between the extremas.”
Leo: “They were quite a lot! The Flux design and its complexity of shapes introduced a lot of unusual issues, mostly about compatibility across masters. In Calleo, it was important to solve the interpolation problems not in a static way, but instead to always keep a look at how the interpolation is gonna look in motion. One of the major points was to keep control of where the crossing point on the set appears while interpolating between the Normal to the Flux family.”
How do you envision Calleo being used by designers in the creative industry?
Plamen: “Calleo can be your everyday go to font if you want to use it in short copies, headlines, branding or web. Combining it with Calleo Flux can help users to achieve strong messaging and coherent design compositions without being unnoticable.”
Leon: “I can imagine Calleo being used for a brand identity, or a campaign that, at first glance, seems quite usual, and that normality bein suddenly interrupted by the Flux version.”
Leo: “I think I am mostly excited about seeing Calleo used in motion or in web design design. I can’t wait to observe how graphic designers take advantage of the Flux axis in motion. It has a really particular visual strength to see how the interpolation is altering the shapes and crossing the contour lines. It emphasizes the digital structure of type design and plays with it.”
Did other fonts inspire you in the design process of Calleo?
Plamen: “It all started from Zapf’s Optima. I was intrigued how a sans serif can be presented with strong contrast and how to emphasize this construction using linear graphic language.”
Leon: “We had a look at many flared fonts such as optima or even Albertus, see how flared stems behave, what could be their link to a Sans and what would it be to push it to extremes.”
Leo: “As I worked on extending Calleo mainly, I had most of the design solutions already present in the font. It mostly worked on rationalizing or simplifying those key design elements.”
Discover Calleo’s Potential
Calleo is more than just a typeface – it’s a tool that empowers designers to create stunning and impactful designs. Its modern and versatile nature makes it suitable for various design projects, from branding to digital interfaces. The interplay between Calleo Sans and Calleo Flux offers designers the freedom to explore new possibilities and push the boundaries of typography.
Experience the versatility of Calleo for yourself and witness how it can transform your designs with its contemporary flair.
Shop Calleo Now
A Closing Note:
As we continue our typographic journey, crafting transcendent fonts, anticipate more insider views into the making of our typefaces. We’re on a perpetual mission to redefine typographic design, bringing forth new expressions through words.
Eager for more? Dive into our vast array of unique fonts and discover your design’s next muse.
