Irene Vlachou

Irene Vlachou is a typeface designer working somewhere between Bristol and Athens. After trying life as an artist and a violinist, Irene found her vocation. Her terrible handwriting and horror of olives turned out to be no obstacles for her becoming a type designer specialising in Greek. In 2004 she gained her Masters in type design at the University of Reading and since then she has been collaborating with international type foundries and corporations as a type designer and as a Greek type consultant. She is a senior designer and the variable font obsessive at Type-Together.

She is the creator of Colvert Greek (2012, Typographies.fr). Colvert is a joint effort of Irene Vlachou, Jonathan Perez, Kristyan Sarkis and Natalia Chuvatin. She is also the designer of Parmigiano Greek (2012–2014), as part of the larger Parmigiano Typographic System of Riccardo Olocco and Jonathan Pierini.

In 2017, in collaboraton with Laurenz Brunner, she worked on the Greek counterpart of the Documenta exhibition’s identity font, Bradford Greek.

In 2018, she published Stratos Greek at Production Type to complement Yoann Minet’s Stratos from 2016.

Through Type-Together she has published three variable fonts: Protipo, Portada and Bree.

Since 2017 she has been participating in the Google Summer of Code on behalf of the Greek Open Source Community, as a mentor on Greek fonts expansion of Latin libre fonts.

In June 2019, together with Laurence Penney, she released the experimental project FauxFoundry, a parametric-variable font system for producing high quality Greek fallback webfonts.