The initial catalyst for the design of Fann Grotesque came from our custom commissions, where we had explored the same genre for a typeface for The Old War Office* (with Greenspace, 2018). The typeface for OWO took inspiration from the eccentricity of Engravers Gothic (1906), turn of the century metal type, literature from WW2 and London Ghost Sign; all felt relevant to take these learnings into the Fann Grotesque project.
The story of Brick started back in 2015 whilst Fermin Guerrero was studying Typeface Design in Reading. Visiting London, and walking down Brick Lane (E2, London), Guerrero noticed an often overlooked, but incredibly beautiful sign for the now-closed pub, The Jolly Butchers.
There was an instant fascination with the forms found within the sign. The style exquisitely blends Art Deco with a touch of Art Nouveau, resulting in highly unique features and a world of possibilities for a potential revival. …
Coign — released in December 2018 — is an extensive study of condensed forms based on the DeLittle type foundry’s Elongated Sans. Borrowing its name from letterpress printing terminology, Coign brings DeLittle’s ideas firmly into the 21st century, applying the systematic thinking of Adrian Frutiger’s Univers to create a comprehensive and cohesive family with a large range of weights and widths. Of course, super condensed styles have been drawn with great success before, however they are usually offered as part of a much larger family. …
When designing a new type, it is often hard to find a starting point devoid of any source material or reference. Modern revivals and contemporary faces are abundant in the Western hemisphere, but it wasn’t until a visit to Japan in early 2017 that this became particularly prevalent. The pairing of Latin and Asian typography is particularly difficult, with often recognised associations and visual directions being misinterpreted in Japanese culture.
The Japanese language, across its three writing systems, contains thousands of individual glyphs that can be composed in both a horizontal and vertical setting, which in the modern day, has…
Introducing Space Mono a new monospaced typeface by Colophon Foundry for Google Fonts.
As designers of type, we most often find ourselves composing a monospaced (sometimes called a fixed-width, fixed-pitch, or non-proportional) typeface in the service of building out the styles of an accompanying proportional type family or type system. It’s about adapting the proportional type’s forms and rules, and discovering how those letterforms behave within fixed limits to give the face new texture and capability. But what if that constraint was embraced? …
Colophon Foundry
Colophon Foundry is a London and Los Angeles-based digital type foundry.
