Compagnon is a genuinely collective act, and that shows in every one of its styles. It was made by five students at EESAB Rennes who went digging through the online Typewriter Database archives, a vast enthusiast catalogue of the machines and the marks they left, and used what they found as raw material for a new family. The archive gave them not one typewriter but many, and rather than smooth those differences away, they kept them. Compagnon has five styles, and the unusual thing is that each cut channels a different era of typewriter lettering, drawn by a different member of the group.

The Roman, the Italic, the Medium, the Bold and a looping Script each had their own designer, so the family is less a single voice than a conversation, five hands agreeing on a project while keeping their own accents. That structure makes it a rare kind of revival. Most typewriter fonts imitate one machine; Compagnon behaves more like a shared history, its styles slightly out of step with one another in the way real typewritten documents from different decades and different typists always were.

The looseness is the character, not a flaw to be corrected. It is published through Velvetyne, the open foundry, under the Open Font License, which suits a face born from a public archive and made by a group. The letters came out of a database that anyone can browse, were drawn by students working together, and were then released back to everyone, freely usable. Compagnon is a typewriter revival that remembers typewriting was always a collective, slightly imperfect, deeply human thing.