font_designer: Dan Solo

Crossroads

Crossroads font

This was a patented design, so we know who designed it and when. August Will was a type cutter who sold his work to a number of foundries. We worked over this design to...

Dainty Lady

Dainty Lady font

You will see this in the old type catalogs as Dainty. Late in the nineteenth century, type founders developed a number of fonts with a “pen-drawn” look. They wanted to complete with the work...

Dangerfield

Dangerfield font

The Barnhart Bros. & Spindler foundry put out a caps-only face called Dante. We liked it, but felt it needed a lowercase. The result here is a rather nice square design, which has become...

Brussels

Brussels font

The Stephenson Blake foundry in England, made two fonts, Flemish Expanded and Flemish Condensed. In our view, one was too wide, the other too narrow; so we redrew it and renamed it Brussels. Why...

Cathedral

Cathedral font

This font was designed as an experiment in simplfying the Blackletter. We never showed it in the Solotype catalog, so it didn’t get much use.

Cleopatra

Cleopatra font

Here’s a great old face from the H. W. Caslon foundry in London; a real workhorse. The lowercase is eminently readable, so you can set entire paragraphs to good effect. We don’t recommend it...

Cognac

Cognac font

Many years ago, we bought a bunch of proofs that had apparently come from the defunct Van Loey-Nouri foundry in Belgium. Cognac was an incomplete alphabet among them, which we completed. Just a guess,...

Beijing

Beijing font

One of the many Solotype experiments in developing fonts with an ethnic flavor, this one is a bit less obvious than most. The lowercase seems to work well.

Brevet

Brevet font

Authentic copy of the original, with a couple of minor changes to the caps, making them fit better. Although made for the American market by an American typefounder, we found this font in a...

Gladiate

Gladiate font

This was a favorite of job printers in late Victorian times. They used it on cards and stationery, as well as small handbills. It was made in a range of sizes from 10 point...