Meet Unifora, Yep! Type Foundry’s uniwidth sans serif with 135 styles

The Brand Identity: Exactly a year before Unifora’s release, on 12 April 2025, Yep! Type Foundry posted on X (Twitter) that designing a uniwidth typeface family was such a challenge, they didn’t think they’d take on another one anytime soon. That was only half a joke. The Lisbon-based foundry had been mid-way through a project that, by founder Roman Shamin’s own admission, came close to being abandoned over a tiny detail: where to place a comma between two Retalic (backslant) ‘O’s. Unifora picks up where DIN typeface left off, taking the constructed logic of technical lettering and pushing it through the demands of contemporary screens.

The superfamily has 135 styles plus a variable font. Its five widths run from Condensed at 75% to Expanded at 125%, with Narrow, Standard and Semiexpanded sitting between. Nine weights span Thin to Black. The slant axis runs continuously from -18° to +18°, covering Italic in one direction and Retalic in the other. Shamin brainstormed dozens of options for the name. Vextor, Constructor, Mechanica, Tectura and Ungineer all came up before landing on Uniforma, which felt ideal. It’s literally ‘unified form,’ with ‘uni’ doing double duty as a nod to the uniwidth principle. But two problems killed it.

The name carried a faintly militaristic undertone, and it was already taken. Unifora arrived as a subtle derivative. The starting point for the family was geometric, which isn’t unusual. “Many type designers start from the same point, and everyone ends up somewhere different. I wanted to find my own,” Shamin shares. The breakthrough came when a long-standing curiosity about uniwidth design collided with that interest in industrial geometry. “An industrial, constructed aesthetic and a uniwidth constraint aren’t just compatible,’ Shamin explains.

“They multiply each other.” Due to the uniwidth approach, a Condensed Bold paragraph occupies exactly the same column as a Condensed Thin paragraph. The weight shifts, but the layout doesn’t move. That’s the part of the design process that nearly broke the project. A Black weight might leave the Thin swimming in space, while widths tuned to the Thin make the Black feel jammed into a box. There is no single setting that suits both extremes, so each decision becomes a compromise. Some designers solve this by serifing the lowercase ‘i’ or playing with uneven sidebearings. Yep!

chose to accept the constraint openly and pay for it with somewhat unusual glyph proportions. The decision to extend the slant axis to +18°, well beyond the 12° where most italics stop, came from treating the rigid geometry as a system that needed testing. “Most type families treat italic as a whisper. Unifora treated it as a stress test,” Shamin shares. “It was a way of pushing the shapes as far as they’d go and seeing if they’d survive.

They did.” Retalic is the more open-ended half of the range, partly because nobody has fully decided what it is for yet. Unifora occupies a specific position within Yep!’s broader type catalogue, which the foundry maps on a personality scale from zero to twenty. Zero is a font with no visible personality. Twenty is one whose every detail shouts from the rooftops. Innovator Grotesk, the foundry’s earlier release, sits at two: a neo-grotesque with just enough technical flavour to feel at home in a developer tool or a fintech product, but quiet enough that most would simply call it clean. Unifora sits at ten.

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The launch of Unifora introduces a unique approach to type design that can significantly influence brand identity, making it relevant and innovative for design professionals.