Around the turn of the 20th Century, the Inland Type Foundry produced a display face named Studley. It was a variation on a design by another foundry called Florentine. A condensed face with a bold, clean look, the design resembled the warmth and feel of a classic wood type. Best applied to headlines and titles, the font reads amazingly well at even 18 point renderings. Jeff Levine had added his own personal touch to his digital version of this old favorite and renamed it Bayview JNL.

Designed at ParaType (ParaGraph) in 1992 by Vladimir Yefimov. Based on letterforms of Firmin Didot, a French typographer from the 18th century, ITC Didi, of 1970, by Herb Lubalin and Tom Carnase, and Russian typefaces of the 18th-19th centuries. A little extragerrated decorative stylization of letterforms in the spirit of Modern Serif, with elements of an irony. For use in headlines, in advertising and display typography. Improved and added with Extra Bold, old style figures, ligatures and other symbols in 2010 by the same author.

Ten years or so after his unique treatment of Garalde design with Trump Mediaeval, Georg Trump took on the transitional genre with Mauritius, which was to be his last typeface. He started working on it in 1965. The Stuttgart-based Weber foundry published a pamphlet previewing it under the name Barock-Antiqua in 1967, then announced the availability of the metal types (a roman, a bold and an italic) a year later. The global printing industry was already in third gear with cold type technology, so there weren't that many takers, and Weber closed its doors after more than 140 years in business. Subsequently, Trump’s swan song was unfairly overlooked by typography historians and practitioners. It never made it to film technology or scalable fonts. Thus, one of the most original text faces ever made, done by one of the most influential German type designers of the 20th century, was buried under decades of multiple technology shifts and fading records. The metal cuts of Mauritius seem to have been rushed in Weber’s desperation to stay afloat. So the only impressions left of the metal type, the sole records remaining of this design, show substantial problems. Some can be attributed to technological limitations, but some issues in colour, precision and fitting are also quite apparent, particularly in Mauritius Kursiv, the italic metal cut. This digital version is the result of obsessing over a great designer’s final type design effort, and trying to understand the reasons behind its vanishing from typography’s collective mind. While that understanding remains for the most part elusive, the creative and technical work done on these fonts produced very concrete results. All the apparent issues in the metal types were resolved, the design was expanded into a larger family of three weights and two widths, and plenty of 21st century bells and whistles were added. For the full background story, design analysis, details, features, specimens and print tests, consult the PDF available in the Gallery section of this page.