22.02.2025: Today it’s Carmen’s birthday, the perfect day to release Carmen is Regular. We and I have known each other for almost a decade. She lives around the corner and has the brightest smile and the cutest dog, Max (Baby Angel Boy or Angel Baby Boy). Carmen directs beautiful films and creates equally beautiful designs. She has this incredible warmth and the sharpest observation skills. Carmen is equally fun and excited as she is serious and thorough.

Over the past years, we have seen each other in all sorts of states: crying and laughing, in love and angry, struggling and striving. We visited each other’s openings, screenings, and graduation shows. We collaborated, endured meetings, traveled, taught together, danced long hours in clubs, and watched Maxi being admired by other dogs on Sunday mornings while eating overpriced pastries. We are growing up in this city and scene together. This typeface is a celebration of all these moments, and it is also a little thank-you to her for always being one of my first beta testers whenever I develop a new typeface. :)

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Carmen is Regular is a bold display typeface that does not try to follow rules or deep concepts. It’s a fun exploration of inconsistencies and intuition. The project itself started when my dear friend Carmen Dusmet Carrasco asked me to collaborate on one of her commissions, a small publication for Jack Bardwell. He had asked her to design a book for Group Therapy, a project he had launched at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. It aims to incentivize Master students of different departments to give each other feedback on their graduation work. The project was a very low-budget production, which is why we decided to take the extra freedom to develop a custom font that could exceed the project. I designed the shapes starting from iPad drawings, and Carmen implemented them from the start in our layouts. It was a fun back-and-forth process and we became closer through this collaboration.

In 2021 this Carmen is regular was pre-release it on Solitype (thanks to Charlotte Rohde & Vivien Hoffmann). However, since then, it has been sitting on my hard drive, waiting for the right moment.

LIGATURES ON DEMAND
Due to the illogical nature of the shapes, the project never feels finished to me. But then again, typefaces are never really finished anyway. Carmen is Regular plays with this idea of never achieving completion, never finding peace. Instead of fighting the sentiment, the project embraces the idea of incompletion and will exist in a state of continuous updates. The typeface already includes 205 ligatures on release day, which are added as OpenType Features and can be toggled on and off.
Since I could not decide where to stop, I leave that control up to you. If you purchase a license, you may send me an email and request five custom ligatures. I will take a few days to draw them and add them to the set. Then, I update the typeface and list you on my website.

Inscribe your initials—or those of your loved one—into the font and be a part of Carmen is Regular.

<3 HBD CARMEN <3