3/9/2024 0 Comments Free typewriter font googleThis called for a different kind of letterform-one that detached itself from the elite hand of the scribe and the pure imitation of manuscripts. No longer privileged, information had become popular, compact, portable, eminently transmissible, and reproducible. While developing Spectral, we looked back to the Elzevir typefaces for guidance because their genius, as a cultural form, was to implicitly acknowledge that the nature of information had changed. We organize our data (and even our finances) in digital spreadsheets. The character set today covers 146 languages (including Vietnamese), has 1,221 glyphs, and includes small capitals, as well as a myriad of symbols and pictograms.Īlthough reading and writing are somewhat solitary pursuits, they’re increasingly collaborative, iterative, and social acts. Spectral has seven weights that span from ExtraLight to Black, with matching italics. Even the intermediate styles (Light, SemiBold) offer enough contrast with their neighbors to create emphasis. So we made the eternal trifecta of ExtraLight, Regular, and Bold unmistakeable in Spectral. But singling out portions of a text presents challenges on most screens that emit light (rather than absorb it). This differs greatly from typefaces destined mainly for print, where a slight change in weight usually suffices to indicate a variation in emphasis. A lot of care went into devising real, clear, unambiguous weight differences between all seven members of the family. Many of these constraints make Spectral particularly well-suited for digital typesetting. Like any other design, this one also required context-specific modifications. As always, we focused first on gracefulness and visual quality. Our design takes material that succeeded in the past and puts it to use in the present.Ī sort of mental back-and-forth held sway during the initial stages of the design process for Spectral. From fifteenth-century France to sixteenth-century Holland and back to nineteenth-century France, the underlying concept of these Elzevir typefaces still makes sense in 2017. While deeply rooted in French type design history, Spectral tends to reject the idea of any country-specific flavor-much in the same way that Elzevir typefaces have always represented a cross-current of western influences from Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States. In the meantime, the stars of French typeface design in the period-including Pierre Jannet and Maurice Ollière-enjoyed success but eventually fell out of favor. Only decades later did this trend catch on globally, with Monotype’s comprehensive and well-advertised revival program. From the late 1880s onwards, these early revivals soon shed their bibliophile status to emerge as broadly useful text typefaces. Naming conventions were sloppy, but the shapes were specific: A serif looking back at the Renaissance, but polished and honed to work hard for neat reproduction on the new and shiny paper surfaces of the time. Across France, countless punchcutters soon began exploring Old Style types as text faces. The Elzevir typefaces mark one of the first attempts to recreate a new modernity, at a time when another modern style ( Didone) prevailed. The French Elzevir (sometimes also known as French Old Style) is a lesser-known genre in the Anglocentric type-design history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. One of the most overlooked highlights of that tradition is the resurgence of Elzevir typefaces, which happened in France some forty years before everywhere else. For six centuries, France has enjoyed a tradition of high-performance designs for immersive reading. We decided that the time had come to reinvigorate the use of well-crafted serif typefaces online. Although their readability is in fact much higher than that of sans serifs, they’re traditionally viewed as fuzzy and archaic in screen-first environments. Common wisdom has long suggested that serifs for screen reading underperform and should therefore occur with less frequency in good type libraries. Defining a new serif face for screen use is a rather broad brief.
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