Custom Typefaces for R+V Insurance

Three families, one brand: why no retail typeface could fill the brief

Fontwerk designed RuV Type, a three-part custom superfamily—sans serif, slab serif, and serif—for R+V Insurance, replacing the existing FF Marselis. No retail typeface was found to satisfy the requirement for all three styles simultaneously, making a fully custom solution necessary. The project delivered 24 static and six variable fonts, each containing 568 characters with support for approximately 100 Latin-based languages.

Set in RuV Sans, RuV Slab, RuV Serif, FF Marselis

Insights

Four sans-serif concepts (Antwerp, Hamburg, The Hague, Brighton) were scored against nine brand-value sub-criteria on a 27-point scale by Fontwerk internally, then by the client teams and MetaDesign's creative director; Antwerp and The Hague tied at 24 points internally, yet the client unanimously selected Antwerp.
FF Marselis's mismatched vertical metric value pairs caused upward offsets in InDesign; the new fonts synchronised all three metric pairs to ensure consistent spacing across applications.
Character widths were deliberately aligned to Marselis to minimise line-break disruption when updating existing templates, balanced against preserving the new typeface's character.
The serif family was designed last and most efficiently by deriving it from the already-finalised sans and slab, with its initial application scoped to an employee magazine in editorial use.