A page from the 1931 Vitrolite catalog showing illustrations of store fronts and building exteriors utilizing the material provided a classically Art Deco type example. The business name “Sylvin” did not offer many characters to work with, so completion of the digital type design was simply left to imagination. The end result is Structural Glass JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions According to Wikipedia: “Pigmented structural glass, also known generically as structural glass and as vitreous marble, and marketed under the names Carrara glass, Sani Onyx, and Vitrolite, among others, is a high-strength, colored glass. Developed in the United States in 1900, it was widely used around the world in the first half of the 20th century in Art Deco and Streamline Moderne buildings. It also found use as a material for signs, tables, and areas requiring a hygienic surface. Over time, the trademarked name “vitrolite” became a generic term for the glass.”

This font was inspired by the Latin script used in European monasteries from circa the 5th to 8th centuries, before the Carolingian “Caroline” (look at our 825 Karolus). It was a regular script, rounded, written slowly, used mainly for specially meticulous books, with a few ligatures, legible, but only with lowercase. The capitals consisted of enlarged lower cases, but here, we have preferred to use two slightly different patterns. Our lower cases are a synthesis from a lot of variants (mainly from the “First Bible” of Charles The Bald), the upper cases were mainly inspired from a 700’s manuscript from the abbey of Fécamp (France). We have adapted the font for contemporary users, differentiating between U and V, I and J, which has no relevance for ancient Latin scribes, and naturally with Thorn, Oslash, Lslash, K, W... punctuation and the usual accented characters which did not exist at the time. It can be used with 799 Insular Title.