Mergenthaler was so confident in Dwiggins’ potential as a type designer that in May 1929 they signed him to an exclusive contract (at $ 2500 per year) months before his sans serif was completed. The company wanted to snatch him away from potential rivals such as American Type Founders, Barnhart Brothers & Spindler and Continental Typefounders, all of whom had expressed an interest in commissioning type from him. The National Display Alphabet Co., makers of Innes Alphabets – alphabets [...]
Dwiggins’ decision to get out of advertising had been building for six or seven years. In March 1922 he found himself unable to complete a job for his friend Carl Purington Rollins, printer to Yale University. “I am really puzzled to know what has bitten me, some kind of stage-fright, or else I am nicked for the time being in my inventive faculties. Other work has gone sour in the same manner.” The problem was not stage-fright but adult-onset diabetes, the same disease that [...]
Electra is an original face designed for Linotype in 1935 by William. A. Dwiggins, the eminent American artist and illustrator who also created the Caledonia series. The type, which falls into the 'modern' family of type styles, is not based upon any traditional model and is not an attempt to revive or reconstruct any historic type. Because it avoids the extreme contrast of thick and thin elements that mark most modern faces, Electra provides a new 'texture' in book pages. Although in x-height it is amost large as Times Roman, the narrow set of Electra makes it very economical in composition. The italic is really a sloped roman, of almost the same weight as the roman; it is so comfortable to read that it can be used for whole texts, and is particularly suitable for poetry. In 1988 Linotype has extended the Electra to a complete type family with four different weights, it was made with true Italics and as a specialty was made available in a lighter end more elegant Display version. The Caravan fonts offer a broad variety of fitting ornaments and border elements which had been designed by Dwiggins. Electra had received a Certificate for Typographic Excellence in Type Design in 1998 from the Type Directors Club ( TDC ) of New York
Electra is a trademark of Linotype Corp. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain other jurisdictions in the name of Linotype Corp. or its licensee Linotype GmbH.
Quality features
The Platinum Collection is the exclusive series of optimized classic typefaces from the Linotype Library.
XSF-Fonts are OpenType or TrueType fonts with an excellent appearance on screen at small sizes or low resolutions – especially engineered and optimized for exceptionally readable typefaces on computer screens using Microsoft® Windows operating systems.
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