Tour de Force Font Foundry is an independent boutique and project-based digital type foundry based in Gornji Milanovac, Serbia. The first of its kind, the foundry and studio was established by Dušan Jelesijevi? and Slobodan Jelesijevi? in 2009.
Dušan and Slobodan both have extensive backgrounds in graphic design and typography, lending their unique skill sets to the success of Tour de Force Font Foundry. Dušan works as a freelance web and graphic designer and while Slobodan retired as a professor of graphic communication, he remains a highly sought-after illustrator, graphic designer, and typeface designer.
The two work together to conceptualize and craft high-quality type designs that provide graphic designers around the world with exactly what they need for their projects. “By weaving our experience across different design environments and cultural spaces, we provide an intricate and instinctive approach to producing fonts,” Dušan and Slobodan said when describing their foundry.
Tour de Force Font Foundry works on commissioned, exclusive typefaces for private clientele and also offers a number of retail fonts for the global design market at large. One of their most recent releases is Plaisir, a modern and elegant serif font family that came about rather unexpectedly.
The concept for Plaisir grew during the space of time that opened as Dušan and Slobodan waited on a client’s confirmation for a project. The pair tried a couple of different approaches to Plaisir in the beginning, eventually landing on a design that incorporated sharp triangular serifs and wide endings.
The end result is a sophisticated and contemporary serif design that works beautifully as a text font yet flirts with the idea of a display typeface. Plaisir is incredibly versatile in this way, offering stellar legibility even in smaller point yet works equally well in larger display settings.
Plaisir is available in Light, Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, and Bold, with beautifully fluid italics for each weight. This varied range makes the family well suited to design projects of all kinds, including headlines, editorials, body copy, print and digital publishing applications, website designs, logos, marketing materials, product packaging, posters, infographics, merchandise, event programs, and social media imagery. It’s a gorgeous choice for branding and identity projects that require design cohesion across multiple media types and sizes.
This type family offers a number of additional features through OpenType, including standard ligatures, ordinals, small caps, tabular figures, oldstyle figures, and stylistic alternates for greater flexibility. Plaisir extends multilingual support to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, and Pan African Latin for design projects intended for a global audience.
Tour de Force Font Foundry currently offers more than 40 products through YouWorkForThem, providing a range of sans serifs, serifs, scripts, and display fonts to suit a variety of design themes and projects. Visit their portfolio to take a look at the rest of their work and bookmark it so you can check back for new additions in the future!
