Public-domain typeface
Canada 1500
A multilingual public-domain typeface created for Canada’s sesquicentennial and later adapted for a proposed Mars mission.
I’m Raymond Larabie, the creator of the Canada 1500 typeface. In November 2014, I created a free, eighty-style typeface called Mesmerize. In 2015, Grant Johnson, senior adviser for the Canada 150 Federal Secretariat, contacted me about adapting styles of Mesmerize to accompany the logo for Canada’s sesquicentennial on July 1, 2017. I offered to create a customized family at no charge and expanded its language coverage to include Canada’s Indigenous languages.
The Canada 150 typeface was initially available through the Canada 150 Federal Secretariat. In 2016, Constance Adams contacted me about adapting it for a proposed crewed Mars mission. I named the new version Canada 1500 and adjusted it for spacecraft and Mars-base signs and labels. I also added Vietnamese, Greek, more Cyrillic languages, and most Latin-based languages in current use.
The package includes font source files and is released under CC0. To the extent possible under law, Raymond Larabie has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Canada 1500.
2025-07-26 update
Canada 1500 was updated to broaden support for Indigenous languages and align with newer Unicode standards. The update adds the Latin capital letter lambda, expands Carrier, Chipewyan, and Nattilik coverage, adds Extended-A characters, redraws several glyphs, and migrates the original FontLab 5 sources to FontLab 8.