Paris, Holland, Munich, Slovakia, Switzerland … Fedra is an altogether pan-European typeface. Swiss designer Ruedi Baur commissioned it from Peter Bilak in around 2000, while living in Paris. It was intended to be a warm, elegant replacement for Univers in a new corporate design for the insurance company Bayerische Rückversicherung AG.

But before the font was completed, a multinational took over the company and the project was abandoned. Fedra, however, survived and thrived in Peter Bilak’s own type library, Typotheque. Early Fedra customers brought with them requests for additions to the font, and a monospaced version followed, along with extended language support and a wider range of weights.

Then, in 2004, came the serif version. Or to be more precise, Serif A, which used the same proportions as the sans-serif version, and Serif B, with proportions of its own. (Bilak likes to compare their relationship to that of Gill Sans and Joanna.) The sans-serif fonts were released multilingually (in 70 languages) from the start, with Greek and Cyrillic characters included, once again confirming the typeface’s pan-European credentials.


The Finnish company magazine Tule ja katso (“Come and see”) has been set in Fedra since 2002