November 2005 Archives

Here's another really first-rate type family that is quite versatile but little seen: Penumbra (available in 16 fonts, four styles x four weights). This 1994 all-caps design by Lance Hidy is based on his own poster lettering. The letter proportions are in turn based on the classical Roman lettering of 2000 years ago, most frequently seen today in serifed form in Adobe's Trajan.

The unusual thing about Penumbra is that it has a continuum of four designs from sans serif to fully serifed, with two steps in between Sans, Flare, Half-Serif and Serif sub-families. Penumbra was originally created as a Multiple Master typeface, a technology which is being phased out, but is still interesting enough that it will doubtless be the subject of a future blog posting.

Here are four of the sixteen Penumbra fonts:




Penumbra Sans Light
Penumbra Serif Regular
Penumbra Sans Semibold
Penumbra Serif Bold

In its pure sans serif form, Penumbra almost recalls Futura or other geometric sans serifs, while in the pure serif form it has the versatility of the previously mentioned Trajan, while being more robust. I think one can use Penumbra for titling/display work anywhere one might think of using Trajan or all-caps Futura, which is saying a lot: book and magazine covers, posters, flyers and headlines are all fine candidates for Penumbra.

I must confess I owe a personal debt to Penumbra: it was the typeface that made me rethink the relationship between classical roman forms and geometric ones, and showed me how well those classical proportions could be used in a sans serif (though of course it was not the first to do so). My own upcoming typeface, Hypatia Sans (of which more later), represents my own take on this issue, among others.

A couple of posts back, I was writing very much from the type designer's perspective, sharing in their angst over the vast new opportunities (=work) that await them these days with multilingual OpenType fonts with lots of typographic features. But, as my colleague David Lemon pointed out after reading that article, the flip side of this coin is the customers' point of view and their high expectations.

Our end users are easily confused and occasionally disappointed by OpenType. After all, everybody talks about the wonderful capabilities of the format. But the reality is, none of the fonts that are available has all those capabilities in just a single package, and no application supports all possible OpenType features. In fact, even of Adobe's own fonts, fewer than half have significant OpenType features. Just because a font is in OpenType format doesn't mean it has small caps, oldstyle figures or lots of ligatures. And it doesn't say anything about having any added language support, either. And worse, it's not like there are just two classes of fonts, "big" and "small," but there are many possible levels of support, both typographic and linguistic....

Occasionally, I am going to do a feature on one of our most overlooked typefaces. These are typefaces that I think very highly of, but don't sell like hotcakes. Today I'm starting with Chaparral, designed by Carol Twombly around 1997.

As you can see, Chaparral is a humanist take on the slab serif genre. It has more contrast than most slab serif faces (even more evident in the semibold and bold weights). The angle of stress is not quite vertical, though it's close. The ends of the slab serifs are not quite square-cut, either. And of course it's proportionally spaced, rather than being monospaced like Courier.

The net effect is a sturdy but versatile text face. Adding to this versatility is the range of optical size variants that the typeface is equipped with. As a full-featured OpenType design, Chaparral also features, central European language coverage, small caps, oldstyle figures, ligatures and other typographic refinements.

You can see examples of the optical size variations in the readme, and view the character set in one of the glyph complement PDFs.

Although Adobe has its corporate typefaces (Minion and Myriad), which reduce my opportunities to use other fonts, I have used Chaparral for a number of projects, to great success. I've recommended it for usage in a remarkable range of situations, from the body text for a health-related magazine, to general office use when something warm and not too clinical was desired.