Le Voyage à Belle-Isle exhibition flyer

According to biographer Olivier Nineuil, Albert Boton started the design on what would eventually become FF Tibere in 1986, under the name Quadra. It was released in 2003 with FontFont. On the font label’s (defunct) website, one could read:

Initially, French designer Albert Boton developed FF Tibere as an all-caps titling face for titles and headlines. However, during the process, he saw the potential for the face to be adapted to fully function in text, too. So he reworked his drawings, making the characters more versatile.

FF Tibere takes its name from the Tiber river in Rome, and classical Roman inscriptional letters were the inspiration for the typeface – unique in its classical beauty and still the base of many of our Latin letters today. However, Boton did introduce some changes to the Roman model: He first intended the face, making the H, C, M, and A wider, as well as the E, S, and F narrower. FF Tibere’s companion italics are inspired by humanist calligraphy.

Here’s a rare – and early – use of Tibere, for a flyer advertising a photography exhibition at Atelier-Galerie Pierre Léotard in Paris. The elegant serif features in roman and italic styles, as well as in small caps. The shown waters are not of the Tiber river, but rather of the Atlantic – the photo was taken by Louis Lacombe in the harbor of Le Palais, Belle-Isle, Brittany.

Posted as part of a series that pays tribute to Albert Boton, one of the preeminent French type designers of the past sixty years. Albert Boton died on July 20, 2023, at the age of 91.