New typefaces: Maregraphe Mega Compressed and Mega Extended

Welcome the widest and the narrowest serifs in our library (and perhaps even in the entire world!)

November 14, 2024


Maregraphe Mega Compressed and Maregraphe Mega Extended is a wild extension of our Maregraphe collection, which grew out of a text found on the wall of a Marseille tide gauge (marégraphe in French), a coastal station that has been there since the late 19th century, daily measuring the change in sea level.

Maregraphe Mega, which inherits Maregraphe’s impressive character set featuring stylistic alternates, small caps, and tabular figures, is a study in the extremes of readability — an exploration of just how narrow or wide a serif typeface can be. Maregraphe Mega Compressed and Extended show their best possible performance in extremely large sizes, such as on a huge exhibition billboard covering half the façade of a museum. However, that is not the only usage scenario. For example, one can make fun of the formal guidelines on labelling readability by opting for an ultra-narrow serif to set text in small and medium sizes.


Get Maregraphe Mega Compressed
from $50 on type.today


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The ultra-wide Mega Extended pushes the technical limits of Adobe software. It’s so wide that the width of certain characters (like M and W) exceeds the maximum glyph width set in some software versions. However, in Illustrator, these wide characters display correctly if you convert the text to outlines. If you encounter any issues, please contact us at info@type.today, and we’ll do our best to come up with a solution for your project.

Until we manage to change Adobe’s perspective on ultra-wide serifs, we are offering a 10% discount on desktop licenses for Maregraphe Mega Extended.


Get Maregraphe Mega Extended
from $45 on type.today


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Maregraphe was designed by Yury Ostromentsky, a graphic and type designer. Yury worked as a designer and in the role of art director in various studios and publishing houses to end up teaming up with Ilya Ruderman to launch CSTM Fonts foundry in 2014 and the type.today store, which came about two years later. The list of projects by Yury Ostromentsky and CSTM Fonts includes Kazimir, Loos, a series of experimental ‘fast’ fonts under the name of CSTM Xprmntl, Cyrillic extensions for Druk, Apoc, and SangBleu, Georgian and Cyrillic sets for Graphik.

Images for the Maregraphe Mega release were designed by Timur Zima.

Mentioned fonts