Balthazar

Try Balthazar

Weights and styles

• Regular 400Balthazar Regular

About Balthazar

Balthazar is a serif typeface modelled on the engraved-looking capitals common on bistro and café fronts in New York City and Paris. Unlike most faces of that genre, the official notes point out, it includes lowercase letters. They also list its construction: a high x-height for compact text, a general form that is less condensed than its models, diagonal stress, gentle contrast, and a weight slightly bolder than normal so that it rasterises well on screen. In the specimen the serifs are tiny, sharp spurs at the ends of sturdy strokes, the capitals are broad, and the numerals are old-style figures with a small 0 and 1 and descending 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9. Dario Muhafara designed it for the tipo foundry. Balthazar has one Regular style with 247 glyphs in the Latin subset, and the copyright notice reserves its name.

Where Balthazar works

Café and restaurant menus

The design takes its cue from bistro lettering, and old-style figures blend prices into the line.

Shopfront-style logos

Broad capitals with tiny sharp serifs look engraved on a sign, stamp or label.

Short texts on screen

The slightly bold weight and high x-height were chosen for clean rendering at text sizes.

Headlines with mixed case

A real lowercase lets a headline keep the engraved flavour without being set in capitals only.

Glyphs

Language support

The family contains the core letters these languages are written with:

• English
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Danish
• Finnish
• Icelandic
• Catalan
• Estonian

Character sets found in the files: latin. The language list is a check of required letters against the font, not a promise of typographic quality in each language.

License

Fonts that pair with Balthazar

Suggestions come from simple rules on the records: a contrasting classification and enough weights to carry body text. They are a starting point, not a verdict.

Use Balthazar on the web

Download the family and host the files on your own site, then declare them in CSS. Please do not link to the files on trendhub.net: preview files here are subsets and their addresses change.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Balthazar";
  src: url("/assets/fonts/Balthazar-Regular.ttf") format("truetype");
  font-weight: 400;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: swap;
}

body {
  font-family: "Balthazar", serif;
}

Or load it from the official source. Google Fonts serves Balthazar with this markup:

<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Balthazar&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

Things to know

Figures are old-style

Numerals differ in height and several drop below the baseline, as the specimen shows.

Single weight

Balthazar has Regular 400 only, with no italic or bold.

Small character set

The file holds 247 glyphs in the Latin subset; there is no Latin Extended subset.

FAQs

Collections with Balthazar

• Fonts for restaurant and café menus

  Serifs, scripts and narrow display faces for menus: a heading face with character and a text face that stays readable in low light.

Similar fonts

Other families in the same classification, ordered by shared use tags. All serif fonts