Industry: Design

Sapfir

Blackletter meets Antique Olive in a gem-cut chimera

Sapfír (Ukrainian for Sapphire) is a typeface designed by Valerio Monopoli and released in 2022. It fuses the minimal, distinctive forms of Roger Excoffon's Antique Olive with blackletter rhythmic patterning. Its sliced, chiselled construction generates a multifaceted texture, with cutting lines frequently converging into ligatures. The family comprises three optical-size styles — Caption, Headline, and Title — supporting Latin European languages across TTF, WOFF, WOFF2, and Variable formats.

Set in Sapfir

Insights

The design explicitly references Roger Excoffon's Antique Olive as a structural source — an unusual pairing with blackletter.
Ligature formation is treated as a structural consequence of the sliced construction rather than a decorative addition.
The source draws a direct parallel between gem-cut selection and the three optical-size styles, framing Caption, Headline, and Title as cuts suited to different viewing contexts.