Able font family
Designed by Marcus Burlile
The history of Able’s connection with the Harry Potter phenomenon is really up in the air. It’s a catch-22 in this business - you either promote your own work and negotiate expensive exclusive licenses, or you work with a promoter and sell your designs to anyone and everyone. It could have been an in-house designer at Rowling’s publisher, Scholastic, or a freelancer who proposed Able for the headings and such. The responsible party licensed it from T26, and JK Rowling’s storytelling made it a star. (I suppose it’s ironic that there’s a whole lot of unwritten history in the typography business.) Able’s rise to fame really is a classic love story between reading and type design. If the books weren’t so popular, Able might still be waiting for some Mexican fast food chain to pick it up for packaging design. The movie deal certainly made the font all the more recognizable, what with its merchandising campaign. Popularity can also cripple a great decorative face. It’s always being recognized as “The Harry Potter Font.” It might just have to wait a few decades for the Potter phenomenon to subside to be freed from the “Chamber of Pigeonholed Fonts.” In the meantime, I’m sure that a lot of fledgling graphic design apprentices are reading their new Potter books, being charmed by the idea of type design when they’re not turning the pages too fast to notice.
Able New
Desktop fonts are designed to
be installed on a computer for
use with applications.
Licensed per user.
Pay-as-you-go web fonts are licensed for a set number of page views.
Web fonts are used with the CSS
rule @font-face used. The license
has no time limit.
Application licensing allows fonts to be embedded in your software applications. The license may be based on the number of titles or the number of installations.
Electronic Publication Fonts can be
embedded in an eBook, eMagazine or
eNewspaper. Fonts are licensed per issue.
Server fonts can be installed on
a server and e.g. used by automated
processes to create items.
A license is per server core CPU per year.
A Digital Ads license allows you to embed web fonts in digital ads, such as ads created in HTML5. These license is based on the number of ad impressions.
Able
Technical details
Suitable browsers:
Google Chrome
Mozilla Firefox
Internet Explorer
Opera
Safari
Font size:
27 KB (WOFF)
,
24 KB (WOFF2)
Catalog number:
151620210
Number of characters:
240
