In the summer of 2018, Google Fonts approached us with the challenge of designing a display typeface. We spent some time perusing the catalog, and we were struck by a pretty big gap in certain typographic styles available—there isn’t a specific name for this genre, but typefaces such as Cooper Black, Windsor, and Souvenir personify it. We call them “wonky” fonts in-house, and that seems as good a name as any. We’ve played a lot with this style in our lettering work, and felt this was a great opportunity to create a display typeface family that celebrates an underappreciated genre.
The origin of “wonky” fonts traces its roots back to the Arts and Crafts experimentations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Golden Type by William Morris, and the extensive lettering of the Roycroft Guild, drew upon a heavily romanticized ideal of an “Old Style” that their progress-besotted contemporaries had lost touch with. Morris’ Golden Type, for example, was actually an extremely crude interpretation of the typeface by fifteenth-century printer Nicolas Jenson. Morris opted to emphasize the perceived effects of the printing process, rather than the calligraphic origins of the form.
Ironically, the letters these artists created, and the interest in wonky Old Style typefaces that followed in subsequent decades—heavy-hitting display typeface favorites like Cooper Black by Ozwald Cooper, Windsor by Eleisha Pechey, or Clearface by Morris Fuller Benton with Linn Boyd Benton—had little or nothing to do with typefaces of antiquity. No one was really trying to score points for rigorous historical authenticity.
Instead, these typefaces were playful, even outright goofy, as a way to inject some personality into modernity. Even during this era, types like Richardson Old Style by Robert DeLittle showcased some of the more elegant possibilities of this expressive approach.
During the 1970s, graphic designers were raiding style books and publications of earlier generations looking for more funky stylings, and found a treasure trove in the “Old Style” types from earlier in the century. The irreverence and friendliness of these typefaces was the perfect countercultural antidote to the perceived stuffiness and chilly efficiency of traditional text faces. A prime example of this style coming out of the ’70s was Ed Benguiat’s swashy version of Bookman for ITC. Benguiat’s type was an ode to Oswald Cooper’s Cooper Black Italic and is known to most people as the friendly, “Thank You For Shopping With Us” (a typographical “wave” of appreciation) that graces grocery bags all over North America.
Mostly shunned since the 1990s as being vaguely tasteless and disreputable, there’s been a twenty-first century revival of interest and use of these wonky typefaces. With the advent of new type technology such as variable fonts, there’s a great opportunity to update this genre with a typeface family that is made uniquely for our time. Please enjoy, and as ever, thank you for shopping with us.
Phaedra Charles, partner at Undercase Type
Fraunces is not an Old Style typeface, but an “Old Style” typeface. It’s a genre of type that is less concerned with the sober and sensible construction of letterforms, and where personality is always paramount.
The Softness axis controls the “wetness” or “inkiness” of the typeface. Although Fraunces is drawn entirely with rounded serifs, it achieves sharpness in the “Sharp” area of the design space with extremely high contrast.
The self-hypnosis revolution has arrived.
Congratulations on your decision to pursue CB radio. Before you purchase the equipment, ask yourself these questions about the radio and the accessories you plan to use.
The booklet “Tips on Saving Energy in Your Geodesic Dome” contains numerous suggestions to homeowners on how to keep their domes cool in hot weather and warm in cold weather, with minimal energy expenditures. It gives examples on how to deal with moisture, plastic deterioration, bad vibes and energy expenditure for a completely open floor plan, with emphasis in areas of hot water use, cooking, laundry and the purchase and use of electrical appliances.
The Optical Size axis is similar to the Softness axis, in that it controls the overall contrast between thicks and thins. The Optical Size axis goes a step further, however, and factors in additional changes depending on the size of the font. At smaller sizes, the letterspacing opens up, x-height increases, and contrast decreases to allow for easier reading. Additionally, at 18 pt/px and below, substitutions for the “wonky” characters are made automatically (see the Wonk axis explanation below). Most modern web browsers will automatically interpret the Optical Size based on the font size specified by the website. Designing in applications such as Adobe Illustrator or Sketch requires a manual approach to typesetting.
The Wonk axis controls the substitution of “wonky” characters. These substitutions automatically switch at smaller sizes (18 pt and below), but can be toggled manually at larger optical sizes. The “lean” of the h, n, and m glyphs is a characteristic borrowed from Windsor. In addition to the leaning characters, the Italic style contains flagged characters with ball terminals.
With two styles (Roman, Italic), three optical sizes (144pt, 72pt, 9pt), three softness styles (Sharp, Soft, SuperSoft), and five weights (Thin, Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, Black), Fraunces comes with over 100 predefined instances for easy navigation of the design space.
Fraunces supports a wide range of languages for global and local audiences, including: Afrikaans, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bosnian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Zulu.