Savate is a humanist sans-serif typeface with reverse contrast. Its name, borrowed from the French martial art, reflects the typeface’s sense of motion. Its open, generous curves and assertive forms evoke wide gestures and dynamic rhythm. Designed with both flexibility and impact in mind, Savate comes in a full range of weights from Extralight to Black, with matching italics, making it well-suited for everything from bold headlines to confident, readable text.
This new release is a complete redraw of the original Savate, first published in 2016 by the We.ch collective (Max Esnée and Hadrien Bulliat) through Velvetyne. While it stays true to the spirit of the original design, every glyph has been refined to improve rhythm, structure, and overall cohesion. The family has also been significantly expanded, now offering a full palette of styles and expanded language support, including Latin Pan-African, making Savate a versatile tool for a broad range of typographic needs.
Max Esnée is a typeface designer, graphic designer, and web developer. Graduating from EPSAA in 2014, he works independently, crafting visual identities and websites for a diverse range of clients. In 2019, he joined the EsadType program at Esad Amiens to further his skills in typeface design. In 2021, he released the Gamuth typeface family at Production Type. Concurrently to his profesionnal practice, he pursues various personal projects, ranging from designing new typefaces to creating web tools, such as the Stack & Justify application, launched in early 2024.
Plomb Type is an independent type foundry created by Max Esnée and Emma Marichal, based in Lyon, France. The foundry creates a variety of typefaces with distinct voices, and also enjoys working closely with clients on custom designs. Alongside its font catalogue, Plomb Type offers typographic advice and support for brands of all kinds.
Fonts are built automatically by GitHub Actions - take a look in the "Actions" tab for the latest build.
If you want to build fonts manually on your own computer:
make buildwill produce font files.make testwill run FontBakery's quality assurance tests.make proofwill generate HTML proof files.
The proof files and QA tests are also available automatically via GitHub Actions - look at https://maxesnee.github.io/savate.git.
When you update your font (new version or new release), please report all notable changes here, with a date. Font Versioning is based on semver. Changelog example:
14 May 2025. Version 2.000
- MAJOR Font turned to a variable font.
- Pan African support added.
- Design Space extented: ExtraLight to Black.
This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is available with a FAQ at https://openfontlicense.org
This font repository structure is inspired by Unified Font Repository v0.3, modified for the Google Fonts workflow.