Oilvare is a hand-drawn, layered typeface family inspired by vintage painted signs and oil cans. While sturdy, it also has a softer side—wide proportions, oval-inspired forms, curled angle strokes (see characters like the K and V), and a medium contrast all help give it a little bit of distinction from the typical sans serif genre.
Mix, match, and layer the styles to your aesthetic liking. The separate highlight and shadow options really help the typeface come alive when colors are used with the solid styles—or choose the individual styles with these details already added. There are also “rough” options for more texture.
Carefully drawn, when you enlarge the typefaces, the subtle irregularities become more apparent and harken to hand lettering of the past. Oilvare also includes a few discretionary ligatures that you can turn on or off in Open Type savvy programs.
Here’s a tip for using layered fonts: When stacking text frames on top of one another, InDesign aligns everything from the start—Illustrator, however, might be vertically misaligned based on how it measures. If so, be sure to click and drag out a text frame to start (don’t just click with the cursor on the page). Then select the stacked text frames, go to Type in the menu bar > Area Type Options > Offset: First Baseline and select “Leading” or “Fixed”.
