FF Lancé supports up to 50 different languages such as Spanish, English, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Irish, Basque, Icelandic, and Luxembourgian in Latin and other scripts.
Please note that not all languages are available for all formats.
The work on FF Lancé began in 1983, when Joachim Müller-Lancé was in design school. Back from an inspiring vacation in Brittany, France, Müller-Lancé drew the first characters for the typeface by hand in class. He intended to use it for a photography project showing pictures from this trip. This was the origin of the medium weight.
Ten years later, in Barcelona, he completed the alphabet, and then added a Light and Bold weight. Lancé was the first typeface he ever digitized. It won the Gold Prize in the 1993 Morisawa type design competition in Japan, which was quite a surprise. Special thanks go to his friend Katrin Meyer, who urged him to submit it to the competition in time. He is also grateful to his type design teacher Christian Megelt for his sense of carefulness even just speaking about character shapes, which made Müller-Lancé conscious and careful in his designs too.
All three weights of Lancé offer you an alternative lower-case a which is closer to a classically-italic form. There are also three different pictograms, one per weight, representing three indispensable items for sitting in a street cafe, discussing existentialism and watching people. Müller-Lancé made them out of parts of the other characters, so they match the style of the entire font family.
