|
COMING SOON: ARCHIVE GARAMOND |
|
|
Written by Archivist
|
|
Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
|
According to our on-line survey 36% of designers would like to have more complex type families with complete character sets. Here is a preview of work in progress.
 Archive Garamond preview
 First complex Archive Type family will consist of 12 full character set fonts
Archive Garamond, first complex Archive Type family, will consist of 12 full character set fonts, one display font –Archive Garamond Open– with basic character set and one pictorial font of fleureons, borders and some other typographic elements. Release of first four basic fonts is expected in autumn. History
Wikipedia says: Garamond is the name given to a group of old style serif typefaces named for the punch-cutter Claude Garamond (c. 1480-1561). A majority of the typefaces named Garamond are more closely related to the work of a later punch-cutter Jean Jannon. A direct relationship between Garamond’s letterforms and contemporary type can be found in the Roman versions of the typefaces Sabon, Granjon, Stempel Garamond, and Adobe Garamond.
Garamond’s letterforms convey a sense of fluidity and consistency. Some unique characteristics in his letters are the small bowl of the a and the small eye of the e. Long extenders and top serifs have a downward slope.
 Claude Garamond's roman text face in use c. 1485.
Garamond came to prominence in the 1540s, first for a Greek typeface he was commissioned to create for the French king François I, to be used in a series of books by Robert Estienne. The French court later adopted Garamond's Roman types for their printing and the typeface influenced type across France and Western Europe. Garamond had likely seen Venetian old style types from the printing shops of Aldus Manutius. Garamond based much of the design of his lowercase on the handwriting of Angelo Vergecio, librarian to François I. The italics of most contemporary versions are based on the italics of Garamond’s assistant Robert Grandjon.
The only complete set of the original Garamond dies and matrices can be found at the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerpen, Belgium.
Archive Garamond
Our intention was to capture the feel of late 19th century prints rather than late 16th century prints when original typefaces first occurred. Archive Garamond is mainly based on fonts from American Type Founders samples, however some features of other "Garamonds" are included as well. There is no single original typeface that could be named as The Garamond, therefore we found somewhat eclectic approach in creating the Archive Garamond quite appropriate.
Digitized fonts had to be modified in order to drastically decrease number of nodes (points that define character shape) to enhance technical performance of digital fonts. Fonts with high number of nodes tend to slow down the computer performance and could cause troubles while printing. On the other hand, we could not reduce number of nodes to that of "normal" fonts, because we would loose the weary look of characters. Some reasonable compromise between performance and looks had to be established.
 Number of nodes for each glyph must be dramaticaly reduced to enhance technical performance of fonts
Fonts will come with full character set that contains all accented characters for all European languages, as well as currency symbols and extended set of ligatures, accesible through the "insert character" feature of main graphic design software and MS Word.
 All glyphs for Archive Garamond Italic
First the four basic fonts (Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic) will be released. Followed by four Small Caps and Old Style Figures (text figures) fonts and later still four alternate fonts with ligatures, alternate characters. We expect first four fonts to be available in early summer this year, we expect next to follow in one month intervals.
Single fonts will be priced at $40, family of four fonts at $120 and the whole pack of 14 fonts at $280.
|
I'm highly impressed
Written by Rocket2411 on 2009-03-24 13:27:14
This is great collection. I love the look and feel of 19th cent posters, billboard, and newspapers. However I'm not making any money at this stage of the game. Thanks for the free download. (I wish there was a choice of one actually Useable font instead of the mixed bag you have.)
| Written by lvr on 2009-01-27 00:32:59
any news on this set ?
I hope there will be accentuated characters ! | Garamond!
Written by JDavidDeal on 2008-04-23 18:09:15
Hurry. I have a deadline. | Extremely Impressive
Written by annieh111 on 2008-02-17 15:39:10
Very useful and adaptable | fantastic collection!
Written by rikahlberg on 2007-11-04 01:10:15
I'm really looking forward to these typefaces. I currently use Adobe Garamond a lot, but these antique faces will give my work a nice late-19th century feel. I'm particularly interested in the ligatures and flourishes. |
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. Powered by AkoComment 2.0! |
Latest News 
