Font Releases:
-Mayfair: The long awaited and much requested revival of Robert Hunter Middleton’s very popular classic is finally here. Mayfair Cursive was an instant hit for Middleton in 1932, and it went on being used widely until late into the 1970s, in spite of it never having crossed over to film type technology. Like a few of its contemporary designs, most notably the work of Lucien Bernhard, Mayfair is a formal script that is somewhat based on traditional italic forms with swash uppercase, but also employs subsidiary hairline strokes in some of its lowercase as an emphasis to the script’s cursive traits. Why these gorgeous letters never made the leap into photo typesetting is a mystery to us. But here they are now in digital form, almost three quarters of a century since they first saw the light in metal. Mayfair was redrawn from original 48 pt specimen. It also underwent a major expansion of character set. Plenty of swash characters and ligatures were added. An alternate set of lowercase was also made, in order to give the user a choice between connected and disconnected variations of the same elegant script. Mayfair ships in all popular font formats. While the Postscript Type 1 and True Type versions come in two fonts (Mayfair and Mayfair Alt), the OpenType version is a single font containing all the extra characters in conveniently programmed features that are easily accessible by OpenType-supporting software applications. We are quite sure today’s graphic designers will be appreciative of having access to the face that all but defined menus, romance covers, wine and liquor labels and chocolate boxes for almost two 20th century generations.
-Johnny: Johnny is the latest addition to the long line of popular psychedelic/hippy/funky art nouveau fonts representing the retro side of the Canada Type library. It is the digitization of a popular but uncredited early 1970s typeface that was known by two different names: Harem and Margit. The film type version had plenty of irregularities and quirks that made it seem like it was done in a hurry. In this digital version the errors have been corrected and the character set expanded to include international characters with built-in alternates, to be on par with what today’s layout artists expect from a high quality font. This font saw a lot of use on record sleeves and music posters throughout the pre-disco part of the 1970s, which makes it a veteran of both the psychedelic and funk periods. This makes it the sharper, sturdier art nouveau contemporary personality of Canada Type’s Tomato font.
-Broken: Broken is a grunge font with two interchangeable sets of uppercase. Its forms are in the Egyptian style of the early- to mid-nineteenth century, and the totality of its setting gives off the impression of a most unfortunate letterpress situation, with badly cut punches, uncontrolled ink spread, and metal shards and slivers strewn all about. Available in all mainstream font formats, Broken works very well and has a very unique appearance in design concepts where the overall visual can benefit from harshness, erosion, destruction or weathering.
March 2006 Notes:
- For the next few days (until the end of this month), every package in our library, including the new releases and value packs, is available at a 35% discount. This is very likely our last major discount offering until the summer of this year, so you may want to take advantage of it before it expires.
- Our February release, the Treasury set, turned out to be a hit! Less than a month after its release, it has made its way onto the bestsellers Top 40, where it now sits pretty alongside Adore and Pendulum.
