Type Gallery – Linotype Really
Gary Munch about Linotype Really:
“Linotype Really brings together a mix of sources. There’s an oblique axis to the strokes that speaks of the Antiquas of the Renaissance and Baroque; there’s a higher stroke contrast that speaks of the Classical and Modern; a regularity in the serifing that speaks of the Egyptians, and there’s an evenness of widths that speaks of the Grotesque sans serif.
The strokes are something of a mix of the edged-pen Calligraphic stroke and of the flexible-pen Engraver’s stroke. The stroke distribution is definitely calligraphic, but with modifications in the stress transitions that come from the use of the flexible pen.
The vertical stress of the Moderns is softened by the Antiqua oblique axis, which gives a stronger sense of the line of text at the base and x-height, and helps define the reading line.
The ascenders are rather generous, which ensures that there is always adequate separation of the x-height band. This frees the x-height to display the word-shape that is so important to recognition of words in a text.
The numerals are old style Mediaeval figures, with ascenders and descenders; but the body of the numerals is larger than the lowercase x-height. This helps the figures to also work well with the capitals; the larger zero-height of the figures matches well with the size of the capitals, and the projectors of the figures match the ascent and descent of the capitals also.
Linotype Really was the result of about three months time, for the two exteme weights from which the Medium and Demibold were interpolated. The other weights range from a delicate Light to a startling Heavy. Small caps, in the same Medium scale as the figures, are in the text weights.”
Download a printable sample of Linotype Really as a PDF.