Fonts in Focus, October 2007

Athenaeum™ was released in 1945 by Alessandro Butti and Aldo Novarese, probably for the Niebolo foundry in Turin, for whom this duo designed many successful types. Athenaeum is an Old Style face with strong calligraphic influence. The Athenaeum font family includes a set of decorative initials illustrated with a symbol beginning, resembling early paper watermarks.

Brioso™ is a new typeface family designed in the calligraphic tradition of the Latin alphabet. Brioso displays the look of a fi nely-penned roman and italic script, retaining the immediacy of hand lettering while having the scope and functionality of a contemporary composition family. Brioso blends the humanity of written forms with the clarity of digital design, allowing designers to set pages of refined elegance. Designed by Robert Slimbach, this energetic type family is modeled on his formal roman and italic script. In the modern calligrapher’s repertoire of lettering styles, roman script is the hand that most closely mirrors the oldstyle types that we commonly use today; it is also among the most challenging styles to master. Named after the Italian word for “lively”, Brioso moves rhythmically across the page with an energy that is tempered by an ordered structure and lucidity of form.

Cajoun™ is a bold serif face from German designer Hans-Jürgen Ellenberger. The letters sit visually low on their baseline, in part due to their small x-height. Also, the curved portions of the letterforms have an old-style distribution of weight, which pulls the eye downward. This font has a contemporary feel, however, with crisp edges, and some pointy terminals. The typeface also contains old style figures. Cajoun is recommended for use in larger applications, where the eye can get a change to dance along its wide curves. Cajoun was designed in 2002, and is part of the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype.

Curlz®, designed by Steve Matteson, is designed to look like bent, twisted metal. The Curlz font is best used for impudent, carefree titles. Curlz is appropriate for menus, signage and greetings cards.
The Curlz Font Family is part of the Monotype Library OpenType Edition.

Duc de Berry™ is a part of the 1990 program “Type before Gutenberg”, which included the work of twelve contemporary font designers and represented styles from across the ages. The design of Duc de Berry was influenced by those of typefaces created between the 13th and 16th centuries. The font was named after Duc de Berry, whose beautiful missals inspired typefaces of the 15th century. The capital letters are especially elegant and can be used either as initials or as contrast to the much more reserved lower case letters.

Ellington® was designed by jazz lover, Michael Harvey for Monotype in 1990, and named after the great band leader, Duke Ellington. From experience gained carving letters in stone and drawing them for book jacket designs, Michael Harvey has created a condensed typeface combining the clear-cut sparkle of a modern face with some of the lively features of the broad-edged pen. Ellington has a fresh elegance that is particularly effective in display, while its compressed forms will prove economical in text settings. The Ellington font family has narrow characters with strong vertical strokes and angular calligraphic traits. Ellington is a lively face and an appropriate font choice for advertising and book work.

ITC Kumquat™ is the work of American designer Eric Stevens. He started with the logo for his company, Tower of Babel Design, and expanded upon the Mesopotamian look to create a typeface to match. Stevens imagined drawing figures in the sand with a stick and how this method would change the way one usually draws characters, usually with lines replacing curves. Most characters are slim but a few, like the uppercase A and L, were made to contrast with the rest. ITC Kumquat is a great display typeface for anything which should have an “antiquated feel.”

Loft™ is a 21st century type design solution inspired by 19th century fonts. It is structured and modular, yet its solid character shapes hark back to a time when type could be held in your hand. According to Paris-based designer Julien Janiszewski, his ambition for Loft was to create a type family “based on a strict hierarchy. I wanted to provide graphic designers with a font suite that would enable them to create systematic solutions.” For the design itself, Janiszewski was inspired by wooden type developed during the late 1800s. He was also influenced by the signage reading ‘DÉFENSE D’AFFICHER’ (‘Post No Bills’) that is often found in France.
Loft is a large family of seven weights, each with an italic partner. Strikingly, counter widths for all the weights remain the same. As weights increase from Hairline to Mammoth, the characters extend by building stroke thickness outside the counter.
More structural interest comes from the way Janiszewski has handled the stroke terminations. In characters like the e, s, and c, they are cut on the same horizontal plane, while the termination of the vertical strokes and the over-dots of the i and j have been clipped at an angle.
Loft is space-efficient in lighter weights while making an increasingly stronger statement as the designs become heavier. Taken as a whole, the Loft typeface family is distinctive, versatile, and always intriguing.

Neographik™ is a bold, squarish, sans serif face. Used in display settings, the strength and weight of the dark strokes will help project your message loud and clear. Unlike typical sans serifs Neographic is not completely, or optically, monolinear. It features a variety of stroke thicknesses and pointed joints which help keep the letterforms compact but not overly black where it is unnecessary. Neographik works best at medium to large sizes such in titles or posters.

Strayhorn™ is a sans serif development of the popular typeface family, Ellington™ . Although classified as a sans serif, the Strayhorn font family has markedly flared stems and calligraphic terminal treatment. A fairly condensed face with vigorous letter shapes, Strayhorn makes an eye-catching display face and an economical, legible text type. The contrast between thick and thin strokes is more apparent than in most sans serif designs, resulting in an open, rather striking appearance on the page. Strayhorn is ideal for use in advertising, flyers, labels and packaging. It will also make a refreshing alternative to the more monotone sans serifs used in magazines, periodicals, newsletters etc.

ITC Tabula™ is meant to be read. The design grew out of a study to create a font to set film subtitles. According to Julien Janiszewski, the face’s Paris-based designer, “I set parameters for the design whereby the letters had to be able to hold up at very small sizes when set on film and yet must be able to be enlarged 2000 times to be read on a theatre screen.”
The subtitle font was not completed, but several months later Janiszewski revisited the design and made a discovery. “I realized that the constraints I had established for the subtitling font was not that far from those people could have in creating typographic signage. Many time this calls for a font that can be used easily in very large sizes for headlines on highway billboards and quite small for text copy.” Work proceeded for two more years before Janiszewski was satisfied with the results.
The final design is a somewhat squared sans serif family of four weighs with corresponding italics. Janiszewski also wanted to create what he calls a “sensitive sans-one that is not restricted to geometric shapes but has a subtle calligraphic, foundation.” ITC Tabula is not only easy to read, it is also a distinctive and handsome design.

The symbol font Wildlife was designed by David Sagorski in 1994 and includes many lively, cartoon-like images of animals. Together with various representations of dinosaurs, there are amusing representations of insects, fish, birds and various small and larger mammals. The symbol fonts are highly versatile and are most effective in the larger font sizes in which details such as the expressions of the animals and their appearance can be best appreciated.