font_foundry: Solotype

Authentic rendering of the original font called Vanden Houten from the Keystone Foundry in Phaladelphia. Very popular among job printers of the early twentieth century.

This idea of “wrong way weights” was originally called French Clarendon by the Americans, Italienne by the French, and American by the Italians. Sounds like nobody wanted to own up to it. When it...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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.