Cinzel Hellenic

Cinzel Hellenic is a Regular-only display typeface derived from Cinzel. It keeps the classical Cinzel base and adds a restrained Hellenic tint for Latin logos, marks, and display use.

The Hellenic treatment is intentionally narrow: the current design focuses on the uppercase A, E, M, and O, preserving Latin readability while nudging the word shape toward Greek inscriptional forms. The A drops its crossbar, the E extends its middle arm to the full arm length, the M raises the vertex of its middle diagonals, and the O is slightly reduced and centered like an inscriptional omicron. The stylistic alternates (salt/ss01/ss02) and the accented forms follow the same treatment; drawn ligature edge cases (Æ, Œ) and Q keep their original Cinzel forms.

Preview

E detail

A/E/M/O overlay

Origin

Cinzel Hellenic is a modified version of Cinzel, originally designed by Natanael Gama. The original project remains the canonical source for Cinzel; this repository contains the Hellenic display adaptation.

Authors

• Original Cinzel typeface: Natanael Gama
• Cinzel Hellenic adaptation: Sebastian Werner

License

Cinzel Hellenic is distributed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. See OFL.txt.

The original Cinzel reference font is kept at fonts/reference/Cinzel-Regular.ttf only for visual comparison.

Build

Install the Python tooling requirements, then run:

python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt
bash sources/build.sh

The build emits:

• fonts/ttf/CinzelHellenic-Regular.ttf
• fonts/woff2/CinzelHellenic-Regular.woff2

No Bold, Black, Decorative, or variable fonts are built.

Quality

CI builds the font on every push, verifies that the committed binaries in fonts/ match the UFO sources, runs the fontbakery universal profile (configured in sources/fontbakery.yaml), and renders the preview images as a build artifact.

The UFO sources are kept normalized with ufonormalizer; run ufonormalizer -m sources/CinzelHellenic-Regular.ufo after editing glyphs.

Regenerating Previews

After building the font, regenerate the checked-in preview images with:

python3 tools/render-previews.py

The preview script compares the current built font with the original reference at fonts/reference/Cinzel-Regular.ttf and writes:

• previews/specimen.png
• previews/e-detail.png
• previews/ae-overlay.png

Repository

Source and releases are maintained at:

https://github.com/sebastian-software/cinzel-hellenic