Village Green pairs foundries for charity in its Font Family project

When Village Green decided to turn typography into charity fundraising, they didn’t just want to make pretty posters. Tom Fearn and his team were after something more tactile, more human – the kind of project that gets you away from your screen and into conversations about ink and paper stocks. The Font Family project pairs two foundries on each B2 poster, creating bold compositions that loosely suggest human figures. It’s a playful concept that works on multiple levels – these typographic ‘people’ become a family of sorts, just as the foundries, printers and designers collaborating on the project form their own creative community. All profits from the screen-printed editions go to War Child UK. The pairing process wasn’t random. Fearn approached it like casting characters in a play, looking for foundries whose typefaces would create visual tension without chaos. “We often found that combining a more conventional or neutral typeface with a more expressive display typeface created a nice contrast, both in form and tone,” he explains. “It let us experiment with the different interactions – sometimes clashing, sometimes blending – to create more dynamic compositions.”