In 2010 Airbus asked a question with lives attached: what should text look like on a cockpit display? With ENAC and the Université de Toulouse it began a study of legibility on avionics screens — low resolutions, hard sunlight, no second chances (ENAC LII).
Intactile DESIGN joined in 2012 to draw the eight variants — Nicolas Chauveau, Thomas Paillot and Jonathan Favre-Lamarine, with ENAC's Jean-Luc Vinot. They named it B612, after the asteroid the Little Prince calls home — Saint-Exupéry flew the mail before he wrote books.
The drawings keep a calligraphic, humanist skeleton under a technical face: natural stroke contrast instead of linear marks, accentuated ascenders and descenders, open counters that survive small sizes — and hinting built for low- and medium-resolution screens, 587 glyphs per font.
It was not judged by taste. Experimental evaluation built confusion matrices — which characters get mistaken for which — and the forms were revised to push the letterpairs apart. Legibility as a measured property, not an opinion.
In June 2017 Airbus published the family as open source under the SIL Open Font License, hosted by the Eclipse PolarSys project (github.com/polarsys/b612). A typeface engineered for one cockpit now reads anywhere — including this slide.
Every word here is B612. The digits were the hard part — 0 O D, 1 l I, 5 S, 8 B — try them: 0O D8B 1lI 5S. A monospaced sibling, B612 Mono, carries the same discipline to code and data columns.