Typophile

Your Fav Unicase Fonts?

kavitha

Taking in Suggestions for some great unicase fonts that I can examine...pls suggest your favs. Also any good resources to look at when creating unicase typefaces.

Gotta be Nick Shinn's Panoptica.
And Tankard's Shire Types too.

hhp

Lanston's Bodoni 26, based on Bradbury Thompson's concept.

Along the same lines: Filosofia.

Hrant's choices are good. I also Filosofia from Emigre, Bodoni 26 from Lanston, Reflex from Sudtipos, Superduty from TypeCo, Changeling from Mark Simonson ... Are you looking for text or display?

> Are you looking for text

Yeah, for setting really hip -and even harder to read- legalese... like a EULA? ;->

hhp

Ha! Funny!

Not a favorite, but

Thanks...I'm just looking to examine some good ones that are out there, that I might not have come across and start on creating my own.

btw I'm amazed that I got some great feedback in a short amount of time ..appreciate it!

Christian Robertson's (free) uncial slab is super cool. Uncial is
the original unicase. =)

http://betatype.com/

I like ff disturbance (not really unicase but the flavour) and filosofia.

Hrant stole my suggestion (grrr) but Tankard also has Alchemy, which would be taxingly pleasing for legalease:

http://www.typography.net/type/alchemy.htm

I like ff disturbance (not really unicase but the flavour)...

This raises the interesting question: what is the difference between unicase and uncial? Disturbance, while not in the style of any traditional Latin uncial script, follows the same pattern of ascending and descending letters. Is uncial a sub-class of unicase, or something different?

Stephen Coles,

I appreciate the your link to my Bodoni 26. http://lanstontype.com/GiampaWonders.html
http://lanstontype.com/Bodoni26.html

Just for the record. I do not agree with Bradbury's concept of one alphabet. I designed Bodoni 26 for commercial purposes. In that regard it has served the Lanston Type Company very well. Personally I find the Finnish transitional type designs of far more interest than "grinding Bradbury's axe".

I predict Finnish transitional types would be commercially doomed.

Although Bodoni 26 is a great success it my speculation that it's popularity is because of its' utility and novelty, not for a profound sympathy towards the politics. As Nick would say, "it is a happy accident".

Isn't Uncial -> Unicase? How did it get started?

Do you mean didn't uncial precede unicase? As terms, yes, but since uncial lettering has a single case that includes forms that relate to both preceding majuscule and later miniscule forms, I'm wondering if it would be considered a subset of a more general classification of unicase alphabets, which also includes other single-case, non-uncial designs. Or is there some significant difference between uncial and unicase. For example, would anyone consider deliberate intent, i.e. rejection of bicameral norms, as a fundamental criterion for unicase? If so, that would limit the unicase category to designs that historically follow the establishment of the bicameral alphabet as the normal way of writing the Latin script.

Captured from web.archive.org on 6 Oct 2008. view this capture