Aarau.

Aarau is an original neo-grotesk Roman typeface: nine weights from Thin to Black, plus a continuous 100 to 900 variable cut. Every outline is authored Bézier work; nothing was extracted from Helvetica, Inter, Arial or any other font.

The project ships with the full toolchain as well as the font: UFO sources, a designspace, generated OpenType features, a Python build pipeline, FontBakery validation and shaping regression tests.

Type affects how everything reads, long before anything else gets noticed. Instead of licensing someone else's for the things I build, I drew my own and keep it in the toolchain like any other dependency.

Compact, open proportions, slightly rounder than the Swiss canon, tuned for editorial text and oversized display alike. Fractions, tabular figures, slashed zero, case forms and restrained ligatures are part of the engineering, not decoration.

Specimens and proof sheets are generated as part of the build, so the documentation you see is always the font that actually ships.

Version 0.1 is out: a development release, installable, open source, and already in use across this site and Catalog1's identity. The interactive specimen runs the real fonts offline.