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A collection of free tools for demonstrating typographic phenomena, for anyone teaching or studying typeface design.

In my very first meeting with director Brian Oakes, we agreed that our episode of the Netflix documentary Abstract: The Art of Design should be more than a profile of a working typeface designer: it should also offer viewers some practical insights into the mechanics of the craft itself. I loved Brian's idea of periodically cutting away from the narrative to offer little lessons, and we both felt that manipulating physical props on a soundstage, rather than using computer animation, would be the most compelling way of demonstrating typographic principles.

The three resulting segments, titled These Are Letters! and heralded by an impish jingle, are the result. For the chapter about optical illusions, I wrote and storyboarded ten different examples, though in the end we whittled these down to a leaner set of four. Since a number of people who teach design have suggested that we manufacture these for use in the classroom, I thought I'd take the more direct approach, and make them available as a free download, as a PDF that can be printed on transparencies. This also felt like a good moment to publish the six additional lessons that didn't make the cut, which are illustrated below. Whether you're teaching typography, studying it, or just giving letters a closer look for the first time, I hope you'll find these useful. -JH

No. 1. Type design is a battle with optical illusions, which we only win through a complete surrender. We convince the eye to see things clearly not by creating rational drawings, but through irrational ones, by introducing strange distortions that outwit the eye: to shape not what we see, but what we think we see.

Even the alphabet's simplest goals begin with some unexpected accommodations. Making all the letters appear the same height means drawing round characters to be measurably taller than flat ones, to counter our physiological tendency to see circles as smaller than squares of the same height. In a typeface, letters that are round at the top or bottom (such as this C) will need to project beyond the height of the flat letters (such as T), by an amount that type designers call "overshoot." Overshoot will apply throughout the character set, to the lowercase, numbers, symbols, and punctuation - and devilishly, it won't always have the same measurement. It's not uncommon for the overshoot of an S and an O to differ, dictated only by how things appear to the eye.

No. 2. Our misperception about circles and squares extends to triangles, too: letters whose strokes converge into a point are prone to appear smaller than they actually are. So type designers customarily apply some degree of overshoot to diagonal letters like A, V, and W, and often, if the design calls for especially sharp corners, the acute points of the letters N and M as well.

No. 3. Another thing we consistently misjudge is balance. This may be a vestige of how humans have evolved to process the physical environment, intuitively recognizing that remote objects appear smaller than those nearby. Applied to typography, it means that making a letterform appear equally balanced requires drawing it to be measurably smaller on top. These expectations about "natural balance" are at work in letters like B, E, and S, which are visibly smaller above and larger below - and even in the letter H, which in order to appear symmetrical, needs a crossbar that's just above center.

No. 4. Curiously, a letterform's construction can also influence how we perceive its equilibrium. Take the letter A, whose most basic recipe is "a delta with a horizontal bar in the center." By rotating this letter about the center of the crossbar, we can see just how far below center this waistline really is. This is because perception is subject to context, and for the bar of the A, what we perceive as its relevant context isn't the entire letter, it's the much smaller region that's inside the delta.

No. 5. Both kinds of typographic balance combine unexpectedly in the letters E and F, whose center arms appear identical, but in fact almost never align. Following what we know about natural balance, the arm of the E will be positioned just above center, in order to appear equidistant from the two other strokes. But owing to its relevant context, the arm of the F will be centered not on the height of the character, but in the void between the underside of the top stroke, and the empty bottom of the letter - making it lower than the arm of the E, its fraternal twin. Often, the arrangement of the F is a compromise between what its own construction suggests, and its need for compatibility with the frequently adjacent letter E.

No. 6. The simple letter T conceals one of typography's great paradoxes: that lines appear thicker when oriented horizontally than vertically. Type designers call this property "contrast," and because it behaves differently in different directions, it's said to be "anisotropic." To create letterforms that appear to have a consistent weight throughout, a type designer will make sure that vertical strokes are measurably thicker than horizontal ones; diagonal strokes, therefore, will fall somewhere in between.

No. 7. Anisotropic contrast affects not only weight, but also dimension: just as we perceive horizontal strokes to be thicker than they really are, we perceive horizontal distances to be longer than they actually are. To create what appears to be a perfect circle or a perfect square, a type designer will create a shape that's measurably narrower than it is tall. Looking at the letter O, we can see two effects of anisotropic contrast at once: in its normal orientation, the stroke weight becomes steadily thinner as it reaches the top and bottom of the letter, and the letterform itself is taller than it is wide.

No. 8. Complicating the way we perceive weight is the "calligraphic bias" that's implicit in the Latin alphabet itself. The very shapes of our letters are the product of the broad-edged pen, held at an oblique angle in the right hand, which, as it moves rightward, produces thin upstrokes and thick downstrokes. This pattern of thins and thicks is apparent in many of the typefaces we read every day, but it's also imperceptibly fossilized in even the most evenly-weighted design. Looking at a mirror image of the letter A reveals that its left leg is subtly lighter than its right, a necessary maneuver to satisfy our subliminal expectations about weight - all the consequence of ancient right-handed scribes.

No. 9. To see all of these phenomena at work, look no further than the letter S: it only takes viewing the letter from a different angle to reveal all the sleight-of-hand that goes into making it appear balanced. Turning the S clockwise reveals the different proportions of its top and bottom halves, a necessity to maintain natural balance. In this orientation, the ends of the strokes appear to flare outward, a consequence of the anisotropic contrast that causes weights to thicken as they approach verticality.

No. 10. Looking at its mirror image reveals an additional illusion: that the S is considerably thicker in the middle than above or below, a consequence of the calligraphic bias that expects downward strokes to be the heaviest. Nowhere is this more dramatic than in its lower left quarter, where the letter's heavy spine rapidly thins out as it approaches the baseline, the combined effects of anisotropic contrast and calligraphic bias that are both undetectable in its normal orientation. -JH

And the second best news is getting to see the logo I created for the ticket, a collaboration with Senior Creative Advisor to the campaign Robyn Kanner, which evolves the earlier mark by Aimee Brodbeck at Mekanism. What a wonderful and uplifting announcement this piece of typography gets to accompany: that the formidable Senator Kamala Harris will join the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in a bid for the White House.

I can't remember an election in which so much attention (and speculation) has surrounded the choice of a running mate, nor having such a large field of eminently qualified candidates to choose from. A consequential decision at an unpredictable time, conducted under absolute secrecy, poses an interesting dilemma to the typographer: how do you create a logo without knowing for certain what the words will say? Logos, after all, are meaningfully informed by the shapes of their letters, and a logo designed for an eisenhower will hardly work for a taft. The solution, naturally, involves the absurd application of brute force: you just design all the logos you can think of, based on whatever public information you can gather. Every credible suggestion spotted in an op-ed was added to the list that we designers maintained, and not once did the campaign even hint at a preference for one name over another.

While the press debated the merits of the candidates' backgrounds, my discussions concerned the shapes of their names. Short names versus long ones; names that began with awkwardly-shaped letters; names with ornery kerning pairs. Names whose letters aligned strangely with biden, disqualifying entire categories of visual arrangement; names that run long, thanks to a W or M, or short because of an I, or all three at once. 'Heterogrammatical' names, which contain no repeating letters; names that are schnapps-words. One peculiar feature of political design is that each logo is beholden to the others, which allows the campaign to safely prepare an identity that anticipates last-minute developments. Another is how it affects the usual pattern of advocacy and critique: recommending a logo that works for only a specific handful of candidates, there's no way of truly knowing what calculus will inform the feedback, because you never know if you're working with placebos. By necessity, good political design is a rigorous, single-blind study.

As both a designer (second) and a citizen (first), I am immensely pleased with the news, and enormously proud to have worked with Robyn and her team to create the typography that befits these two extraordinary public servants. -JH

The episode of Abstract about typeface designer Jonathan Hoefler is nominated for a 2020 Primetime Emmy Award

I'm thrilled to discover that my episode of the Netflix original documentary series Abstract: The Art of Design has been nominated for a 2020 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Main Title Design. If ever there was a meaningful category for a typographer, this is it!

Designers know that typography plays a critical role in filmmaking, never more so than in a series like Abstract, and most especially in an episode devoted to typeface design. This is a documentary in which the visible typography of the city is overlaid with typographic annotations, seamlessly segueing into an opening credit sequence that's used not merely to introduce the story, but to begin telling it. I'm overjoyed that this splendid piece of filmmaking has been singled out for recognition.

While I had the privilege of contributing the most atomic raw materials to the main titles, the nomination honors a sequence that's the work of the Abstract team, beginning with Executive Producers Scott Dadich, Morgan Neville, and Dave O'Connor, Director Brian Oakes, Motion Graphics Producer Paula Chowles, Creative Director Allie Fisher, Motion Graphics Designer Anthony Zazzi, and Composers Timo Elliston and Brian Jones, to whom I am extraordinarily grateful. I'm equally honored to be in such fine company for the nomination, which this episode of Abstract shares with Carnival Row, Godfather of Harlem, The Morning Show, The Politician, Watchmen, and Westworld.

The 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards will be broadcast on September 20. (In an irresistible coincidence, the visual identity for the event uses our Decimal typeface, whose creation is the subject of this episode of Abstract.) If you haven't seen it, I hope you'll spend some time with the series: it's still streaming on Netflix in 190 countries, and available in thirty languages. -JH

A designers' favorite gets a major upgrade, gaining small caps, tabular figures, an easier way to typeset fractions, and a pair of fonts containing 250 ornaments.

I'm delighted to introduce today's expansion of our Sentinel family. Everything from 'Fonts by Hoefler&Co' to the headline above is set in Sentinel, making it one of the typefaces on which I depend the most - a distinction I share with the thousands of designers who've made Sentinel a part of their work. Today's new Sentinel Pro includes a number of new features, including one that's occasioned by our recent working-from-home, and another that's been on the drawing board for nearly thirty years, a new personal record for the slow simmer.

What's New

The new Sentinel Pro adds small caps, tabular figures, fractions, numerics, and more. We've updated the fonts with the newest members of the character set - the rupee and ruble symbols, the capital and small cap eszett, the numero - and designed two sets of printers' fists (or 'manicules') that Netflix viewers will know I can't resist. All of these additions have been created in both the multipurpose Sentinel Pro and the web-optimized Sentinel ScreenSmart Pro, an adaptation of the family that's specially engineered for text sizes in the browser; you can see Sentinel ScreenSmart at work in the font's Design Notes section.

Only in 2020...

This season, while everyone at H&Co has been working from home, we've all been spending a little extra time with domestic projects. The hours we've logged with cookbooks, online recipes, woodworking plans, and patterns for sewing facemasks has reminded us just how many fractions there are in the world - and just how inconvenient they are to typeset. We've all seen instructions that backslide into the occasional '1/2' where '½' was intended, as well as countless improvisations for connecting whole numbers to their fractional parts. (The manuscript that reads '8-1/2' often produces '8-½' instead of the desired '8½,' a slippery typo that's hard to detect, and harder still to fix using a wholesale find-and-change.) In speaking with cookbook designers, we've come up with a new approach for typesetting fractions that we think might make them easier to wrangle, and we've baked this new mechanism directly into the new Sentinel Pro fonts. You'll find more about how this works in the ' Smart Fractions' section of Sentinel's How to Use page, along with a few more automated features to help make fine typography that much more attainable in a production workflow.

Sentinel Ornaments

In the early nineties, I fell in love with a set of nineteenth century decorative printers' dashes that were reproduced in a journal article. I went about faithfully digitizing them, as an exercise in understanding what made them tick, but quickly discovered just how unforgiving digital outlines can be when it comes to capturing the charming idiosyncrasies of metal type. Reducing some shapes to their underlying geometries made them sterile, but recording their every inconsistency made them awkward. Some shapes were so disfigured by the effects of printing that it was difficult to guess what the original typefounder had even intended. These ornaments have been my rainy day project for the better part of thirty years, and their solution only recently came into focus. I took the opportunity to prune the original set, and come up with nearly two hundred additional shapes in a sympathetic style. Their new form shares many of Sentinel's motifs, so I've welcomed them into the family: these new fonts, Sentinel Ornaments Bright and Dark, are available as a package, and also included in Sentinel Pro. They're exactly what I'd hoped for: not merely a means to reproduce some handsome historical artifact, but a robust and well-appointed toolkit for creating new and more relevant kinds of typographic decoration.

My thanks to the team at H&Co who contributed to this project, especially Colin Ford who took on the challenge of constructing and painstakingly testing Sentinel's new fraction feature, and Sara Soskolne who joined me on my mad odyssey into ornaments and manicules. Whether you're a designer who relies on Sentinel already, or are taking an interest in the fonts for the first time, I hope the new Sentinel Pro will find a welcome home in your own font library. -JH

Two H&Co typefaces, and a new typographic system designed for the campaign.

On Independence Day, Vice President Joe Biden's presidential campaign began rolling out a new visual identity built on two typefaces by Hoefler&Co: the sans serif , and the seriffed . We could not be more proud to see our work support a campaign of nuanced thinking and decisive action, in the critical election before us.

When I was approached by Robyn Kanner , Senior Creative Advisor to Biden For President , she shared with me one of the campaign's most interesting communications challenges: its reliance on sophisticated and irreducible messages, which would need the clarifying effects of typography. Kanner described this in musical terms, talking about the ways in which rhythms and harmonic resolutions can shape the contours of a long lyric. For me, this resonated with the typography of America's revolutionary period, and its vogue for capitalizing significant words: "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," as these unalienable rights are famously styled in The Declaration of Independence.

Working together, we came up with some guidelines for the campaign's typography, which would help articulate thoughtful messages with attentive typography. Words of action would be set in Decimal's declarative small capitals, while the supporting syntax would rely on Mercury Text Grade Four. Both fonts are considered and unobvious choices for a national campaign: less than a year old, Decimal is a contemporary typeface, but one that's rooted in the same traditions as our most enduring designs, while the time-tested Mercury is a stalwart but adventurous text face designed to take on any challenge. Both choices feel especially apt.

The words above come from the Vice President Biden's on the Fourth of July, a surprisingly candid assessment of the unfinished American project. We at Hoefler&Co are honored that our work is helping give form to these ideas, and serving a campaign of optimism, determination, and ideas. -JH

Type designers love a good pangram. Pangrams, of course, are sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once, of which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is surely the most famous. Lettering artists of the previous generation bequeathed us jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz; puzzlers are fond of the impossibly compact Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx for its 26-letter world record. Some time in the early nineties, I whiled away an entire afternoon in a San Francisco café coming up with a bunch of my own, honoring typeface designers (mix Zapf with Veljović and get quirky Béziers), and philosophers (you go tell that vapid existentialist quack Freddy Nietzsche that he can just bite me, twice), and the uplifting grace of a cosmos in balance (Wham! Volcano erupts fiery liquid death onto ex-jazzbo Kenny G.) Pangrams are unctuous little brain ticklers, challenging to concoct, droll to read, and immensely popular for presenting fonts.

I find them singularly useless in type design, and I don't use them in my work.

An inline adaptation of a distinctive slab serif, Cesium is an unusually responsive display face that maintains its high energy across a range of different moods.

I always felt that our Vitesse typeface, an unusual species of slab serif, would take well to an inline. Vitesse is based not on the circle or the ellipse, but on a less familiar shape that has no common name, a variation on the 'stadium' that has two opposing flat edges, and two gently rounded sides. In place of sharp corners, Vitesse uses a continuously flowing stroke to manage the transition between upright and diagonal lines, most apparent on letters like M and N. A year of making this gesture with my wrist, both when drawing letterforms and miming their intentions during design critiques, left me thinking about a reduced version of the typeface, in which letters would be defined not by inside and outside contours, but by a single, fluid raceway. Like most straightforward ideas, this one proved challenging to execute, but its puzzles were immensely satisfying to solve.

Adding an inline to a typeface is the quickest way to reveal its secrets. All the furtive adjustments in weight and size that a type designer makes - relieving congestion by thinning the center arm of a bold E, or lightening the intersecting strokes of a W - are instantly exposed with the addition of a centerline. Adapting an existing alphabet to accommodate this inline called for renovating every single character (down to the capital I, the period, and even the space), in some cases making small adjustments to reallocate weight, at other times redesigning whole parts of the character set. The longer we worked on the typeface, the more we discovered opportunities to turn these constraints into advantages, solving stubbornly complex characters like € and § by redefining how an inline should behave, and using these new patterns to reshape the rest of the alphabet.

The slab serif Vitesse, and the inline Cesium.

The outcome is our new typeface, Cesium®. It shares many of Vitesse's qualities, its heartbeat an energetic thrum of motorsports and industry, and it will doubtless be welcome in both hardware stores and Hollywood. But we've been surprised by Cesium's more reflective moods, its ability to be alert and softspoken at the same time. Much in the way that vibrant colors can animate a typeface, we've found that Cesium's sensitivity to spacing most effectively changes its voice. Tighter leading and tracking turns up the heat, heightening Cesium's sporty, high-tech associations, but with the addition of letterspacing it achieves an almost literary repose. This range of voices recommends Cesium not only to logos, book covers, and title sequences, but to projects that regularly must adjust their volume, such as identities, packaging, and editorial design. (Read more about how to use Cesium.)

As for its name: Cesium is a chemical element, one of only five metals that's liquid at room temperature. Resembling quicksilver, cesium is typically stored in a glass ampule, where the tension between a sturdy outer vessel and its volatile contents is scintillating. The Cesium typeface hopes to capture this quality, its bright and insistent inline restrained by a strong and sinuous container.

Cesium is one of only three H&Co typefaces whose name comes from the periodic table, a distinction it shares with Mercury and Tungsten. At a time when I considered a more sci-fi name for the typeface, I learned that these three elements have an unusual connection: they're used together in the propulsion system of nasa's Deep Space 1, the first interplanetary spacecraft powered by an ion drive. I found the association compelling, and adopted the name at once, with the hope that designers might employ the typeface in the same spirit of discovery, optimism, and invention. -JH

Cesium by H&Co. Exclusively at typography.com.

Five typography-adjacent books for indoor times.

I suspect I'm not alone in my current appetite for reading: right now I'm craving things that are written with clarity, wit, honesty, and heart, and I very much need to hear from good-natured people of extraordinary ability who love what they do. Below are some of the books I've most enjoyed reading of late, three connected only tangentially with typography because their subjects are words, and two that are more expressly about design. All five share a sincerity, an attention to detail, and a sense of humor that has kept me smiling for weeks. I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I have.

Senator Elizabeth Warren withdrew from the presidential race today, having run a campaign of candor and intelligence that strengthened the debate, and having shared a wealth of original ideas that can only strengthen the nation.

We had the pleasure of working with Blue State Digital on the Warren campaign: they selected our Ringside and Verlag typefaces for the identity, and commissioned H&Co's Jonathan Hoefler and Sara Soskolne to refine the logo that they designed, one created to bridge and serve these two distinct typefaces.

We're grateful to have again worked with Matt Ipcar and his team at Blue State Digital, with whom we collaborated on the Obama-Biden 2012 logo, and to have been afforded the chance to contribute to a campaign of ideas from an extraordinary thinker and leader. Senator Warren, thank you for raising the level of public discourse, for your continuing public service, and for your unwavering vision of a country that serves all the people. -JH

Jonathan Hoefler offers suggestions to designers struggling with letterforms, and shares these observations with everyone following @HoeflerCo.

From time to time, I've been invited to offer advice to designers wrestling with thorny letterforms, and have shared my observations on Twitter. Sometimes these are conversations with first time type designers, other times they're with accomplished lettering artists who just need a second set of eyes. I love these exchanges (no surprise, this is my day job at Hoefler&Co), so I thought I'd make this a regular feature, open to anyone who's interested in type.

NEW - Alex York's stalwart alphabet uses different techniques to maximize the space. I offer a few more, with some thoughts about when to let character widths take a back seat to spacing.
See the critique & discussion

No. 6 - Just three characters into his new typeface, Dylan Menges and I chat about his letter C, a discussion that touches on centers of gravity, open and enclosed curves, and the battle between arcs and parabolas. (Spoiler alert: parabolas win.)
See the critique & discussion

No. 5 - An exchange with Jorge Gutiérrez Marco about the revival of lettering from a rural Spanish school, and some thoughts about how to approach "naive lettering" with sensitivity and respect.
See the critique & discussion

No. 4 - Josh Apostolopoulos tackles the recreation of a ninteenth century slab serif, discovering that they key to a good typeface is sometimes the one character you haven't drawn. Included: a little trick for creating smooth curves in the center of the letter s.
See the critique & discussion

No. 3 - Designing a charming upright script that draws on roman as well as italic forms, Paul von Excite encounters a phenomenon in which the very shape of the lowercase e is influenced by letterspacing.
See the critique & discussion

No. 2 - The redoubtable Jessica Hische tackles a geometric sans serif that straddles the line between refined and insouciant.
See the critique & discussion

No. 1 - Louie Mantia takes on a seemingly simple style that demands deceptively sophisticated typographic maneuvers. Among my suggestions, a trick we quietly use for managing the lowercase g.
See the critique & discussion

Above, excerpts of some of the conversations we've been having. I'm delighted by the range of projects people have been sending my way, and the opportunities they've provided to discuss all the factors that influence a typeface: not only local details (like 'how to draw an S '), but philosophical topics as well. Swipe through and you'll find links to each of these critiques.

If you're a designer who could use a sounding board, send me a direct message and I'll do my best to get in touch. I'm especially happy to hear from students, from anyone in under-represented communities, and from designers who don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of - not just people working independently, but anyone who's the lone type fanatic in their world. We've all been there! -JH

Type Capsules are $99 font collections from H&Co, each including five font styles chosen for both compatibility and versatility. And since each comes with $125 in discounts toward larger font families, they're a practical way to build your own font library.

Type capsules are a new and simple way to get started with fine typography. For students, they're an affordable way to start using professional fonts; for practicing designers, they're a new pathway toward building a library of fonts that will last a lifetime. And for non-designers, they're an informed place to begin, offering not only suggestions about which fonts to start with, but ideas about how to get the most out of them.

Today we're introducing three type capsules, each created for a different kind of communications: a Foundation capsule as a basic typographic toolbox, a Digital capsule for designer-developers, and a Literary capsule for publishing. I chose each of these fonts personally, by working in reverse: starting by designing the kinds of things that could most benefit from better typography, and selecting those fonts that best fit the bill - fine-tuning each selection along the way, to ensure that every type capsule stands alone as a complete, effective, and flexible tool for design. -JH

The Foundation type capsule is a versatile toolbox for communications: a serif and a sans serif, plus an accent face to mark out guideposts that create points of entry.

Two of the families I find myself reaching for the most are the slab-serif Sentinel and the sans serif Ideal Sans. Both are used throughout this website, whose recent redesign was a useful lesson in economy: with an eye toward bandwidth, we wanted to rely on as few fonts as possible, while creating templates that were varied and engaging. I've found this same thriftiness useful in other kinds of design work as well, and have discovered just how useful these particular fonts are in projects as wide-ranging as catalogs, product literature, and printed correspondence.

Designer Brian Hennings and I put together examples of nineteen different projects built from the five styles in the Foundation capsule. Some show how the choice between fonts can change the voice in which text is read, others demonstrate ways in which these particular fonts can come together, to create unexpectedly sophisticated and multi-layered formats. As its name suggests, we think the Foundation type capsule is a great place to begin building a typographic library - or a great place to land, if you're shaping all the communications for a small organization.

The $99 Foundation type capsule includes $125 in credits toward the purchase of its larger families: save $25 off Idlewild, $50 off Sentinel, and $50 off Ideal Sans.
The Foundation Type Capsule, $99 from H&Co.

A collection for designer-developers, the Digital type capsule features not only typefaces for creating finished products, but also the Operator Mono font for use in your favorite IDE.

Developers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the Operator Mono family that we created for programming. But not everyone needs all of the styles in its extended family, so we selected our two favorite fonts for the terminal - the screen-optimized Operator Mono ScreenSmart Book and Book Italic - as the core of our Digital type capsule, the second in the series.

Working with Operator not only in the terminal, but while designing websites, apps, tutorials, and documentation (not to mention what might be my favorite template for personal correspondence), I felt the need for another sans serif to use in counterpoint. The natural choice was Decimal, our latest release, which itself was shaped by the input of web developers, who'd encouraged me to create the set of UI icons included in the fonts. We've paired these with a compact style of Gotham Extra Narrow that I've always found useful for headlines in sizes both large and small.

The $99 Digital type capsule includes $125 in credits toward the purchase of its larger families: save $25 off Gotham, $50 off Operator, and $50 off Decimal.
The Digital Type Capsule, $99 from H&Co.

The Literary type capsule is designed with publishing in mind, its hard-working serif and sans serif crowned by a striking and articulate headline face.

Where the Foundation capsule can handily render a catalog or a newsletter, I thought that designers tasked with more traditional publishing projects could benefit from a capsule of their own. For designers of books, magazines, and journals, we've created the Literary type capsule, with fonts up to the challenge of even the most complex and demanding editorial formats.

The Literary capsule begins with our Chronicle Text typeface, originally designed for newspapers, and expands to include members of two less frequently seen families: the sans serif Ringside Regular, and the headline face Quarto, both designs of recent vintage. We've designed eighteen examples of formats that use these faces together, which range from a conservative opinion page to an energetic technology column, all the while explaining everything we've discovered about how to shape a flexible and powerful typographic palette.

The $99 Literary type capsule includes $125 in credits toward the purchase of its larger families: save $25 off Quarto, $50 off Ringside, and $50 off Chronicle Text.
The Literary Type Capsule, $99 from H&Co.

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Typographic Illusions | Fonts by Hoefler&Co.

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A collection of free tools for demonstrating typographic phenomena, for anyone teaching or studying typeface design. In my very first meeting with director Brian Oakes, we agreed that our episode of the Netflix documentary Abstract: The Art of Design should be more than a profile of a working typeface designer: it should also offer viewers some practical insights into the mechanics of the craft itself.