Romain 20 is a well-rounded and clear-cut interpretation of a French elzevir, revisited to suit twenty-first century taste. Designed by Alice Savoie, the family is released in 2020 after 8 years in the making.
Romain 20 is a contemporary adaptation of a metal typeface originally named “Romain Vingtième siècle”, distributed by the French Fonderie Allainguillaume at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Savoie stumbled across the typeface in a 1902 edition of the journal La fonderie typographique and was immediately seduced by its texture on the page.
The typeface features a unique combination of flavours, with some attributes that are very much reminiscent of French publishing and jobbing work of the period. Soft bowl terminals are balanced by sharp bracketed serifs. The typeface combines a certain idea of French elegance with a hint of Art Nouveau frivolity.
The typeface was initiated as a revival of the text cuts of the roman and italic styles. A bold and a bold italic were later added to the family for greater versatility. The generous and sturdy proportions of the regular and italic styles have been fine-tuned to be optimal at text size, while the bold variant can prove particularly efficient in display. The italic retains generous proportions, making it fairly comfortable to read in continuous settings. The bold is particularly dark.

Type design: Alice Savoie
Typeface development: Fátima Lázaro
Font mastering: Roxane Gataud

Uppercases
Lowercases
Small Caps (only for Regular and Bold)
Standard Punctuation
Caps Punctuation
Small Caps Punctuation (only for Regular and Bold)
Proportional Lining Figures
Proportional Old Style Figures
Tabular Lining Figures
Tabular Old Style Figures
Small Caps Figures (only for Regular and Bold)
Prebuild And Automatic Fractions
Superiors/Inferiors
Ordinals
Symbols & Mathematical Signs
Standard Ligatures
Discretionary Ligatures
Accented Uppercases
Accented Lowercases
Accented Small Caps (only for Regular and Bold)
Stylistic Alternates
Arrows
Ornaments