Coolvetica

Coolvetica

Category	Grotesque sans-serif, display
Designer	Ray Larabie
Foundry	LarabieFonts
Date released	September 7, 1999
License	Freeware
Variations	Compressed Condensed Crammed
Trademark	Larabie

Coolvetica is a neogrotesque sans-serif typeface designed as a freeware display type by Ray Larabie in the late 1990s. It is indirectly based upon Helvetica.

Origin

Ray Larabie released Coolvetica on September 7, 1999. It was an attempt to capture the logotype aesthetic of the 1970s, when designers often customized Helvetica into more playful and tightly spaced forms. The Stop & Shop supermarket logo from 1973 to 1982 was the main reference point. Its distinctive lowercase t, shaped like a reversed J, became the seed for the design. The font was made from scratch in Fontographer, expanding the curly theme of the t into other letters such as the j, which was given a full curl. The first release was free. In 2009, the family was rebuilt and expanded to include a full range of weights from Ultra-Light to Heavy, along with italics, which were commercial releases; a later addition added a series of condensed and compressed versions, which were formed by shrinking the characters and using vertical lines to increase their heights back to their standard heights (thus, characters such as 0 and O resemble rounded rectangles instead of ellipses as with a traditional method of condensation).

Impact

Coolvetica is, by far, Larabie's most popular font. Florence Deygas and Olivier Kuntzel used Coolvetica for the design work of the 2002 film Catch Me if You Can, which they remarked was due to the font's evocation of the 1960s and the works of graphic designers such as Saul Bass and Paul Rand. Larabie remarked in his autobiography that though it was originally meant to evoke the aesthetics of the 1970s, its widespread popularity instead led to it becoming evocative of its own era of the turn of the millennium.