It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that these letter shapes are familiar. They have the unmistakable color and weight of Cooper Black, Oswald Cooper's most famous typeface from 1921. What should be a surprise is that these letters are actually from George Auriol's Robur Noir (or Robur Black), published in France circa 1909 by the Peignot foundry as a bolder, solid counterpart to its popular Auriol typeface (1901). This face precedes Cooper Black by a dozen of years and a whole Great War. Cooper Black has always been a bit of a strange typographical apparition to anyone who tried to explain its original purpose, instant popularity in the 1920s, and major revival in the late 1960s. BB&S and Oswald Cooper PR aside, it is quite evident that the majority of Cooper Black's forms did not evolve from Cooper Old Style, as its originators claimed. And the claim that it collected various Art Nouveau elements is of course too ambiguous to be questioned. But when compared with Robur Noir, the "elements" in question can hardly be debated. The chronology of this "machine age" ad face in metal is amusing and stands as somewhat of a general index of post-Great War global industrial competition: - 1901: Peignot releases Auriol, based on the handwriting of George Auriol (the "quintessential Art Nouveau designer," according to Steven Heller and Louise Fili), and it becomes very popular. - 1909-1912: Peignot releases the Robur family of faces. The eight styles released are Robur Noir and its italic, a condensed version called Robur Noir Allongée (Elongated) and its italic, an outline version called Clair De Lune and its condensed/elongated, a lined/striped version called Robur Tigre, and its condensed/elongated counterpart. - 1914 to 1918: World War One uses up economies on both sides of the Atlantic, claims Georges Peignot with a bullet to the forehead, and non-war industry stalls for 4 years. - 1921: BB&S releases Cooper Black with a lot of hype to hungry publishing, manufacturing and advertising industries. - 1924: Robert Middleton releases Ludlow Black. - 1924: The Stevens Shanks foundry, the British successor to the Figgins legacy, releases its own exact copies of Robur Noir and Robur Noir Allongée, alongside a lined version called Royal Lining. - 1925: Oswald Cooper releases his Cooper Black Condensed, with similar math to Robur Noir Allongée (20% reduction in width and vectical stroke). - 1925: Monotype releases Frederick Goudy's Goudy Heavy, an "answer to Cooper Black". Type historians gravely note it as the "teacher steals from his student" scandal. Goudy Heavy Condensed follows a few years later. - 1928: Linotype releases Chauncey Griffith's Pabst Extra Bold. The condensed counterpart is released in 1931. When type production technologies changed and it was time to retool the old faces for the Typositor age, Cooper Black was a frontrunning candidate, while Robur Noir was all but erased from history. This was mostly due to its commercial revival by flourishing and media-driven music and advertising industries. By the late 1960s variations and spinoffs of Cooper Black were in every typesetting catalog. In the early- to mid-1970s, VGC, wanting to capitalize on the Art Nouveau onslaught, published an uncredited exact copy of Robur Black under the name Skylark. But that also went with the dust of history and PR when digital tech came around, and Cooper Black was once again a prime retooling candidate. The "old fellows stole all of our best ideas" indeed. So almost a hundred years after its initial fizz, Robur is here in digital form, to reclaim its rightful position as the inspiration for, and the best alternative to, Cooper Black. Given that its forms date back to the turn of the century, a time when foundry output had a closer relationship to calligraphic and humanist craft, its shapes are truer to brush strokes and much more idiosyncratic than Cooper Black in their totality's construct. Robur and Robur Italic come in all popular font formats. Language support includes Western, Central and Eastern European character sets, as well as Baltic, Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish, and Celtic/Welsh languages. A range of complementary f-ligatures and a few alternates letters are included within the fonts.

An inline adaptation of a distinctive slab serif, Cesium is an unusually responsive display face that maintains its high energy across a range of different moods. The Cesium typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 2020. An energetic inline adaptation of Hoefler’s broad-shouldered Vitesse Black typeface (2000), Cesium is named for the fifty-fifth member of the periodic table of the elements, a volatile liquid metal that presents as a scintillating quicksilver. From the desk of the designer, Jonathan Hoefler: I always felt that our Vitesse typeface, an unusual species of slab serif, would take well to an inline. Vitesse is based not on the circle or the ellipse, but on a less familiar shape that has no common name, a variation on the ‘stadium’ that has two opposing flat edges, and two gently rounded sides. In place of sharp corners, Vitesse uses a continuously flowing stroke to manage the transition between upright and diagonal lines, most apparent on letters like M and N. A year of making this gesture with my wrist, both when drawing letterforms and miming their intentions during design critiques, left me thinking about a reduced version of the typeface, in which letters would be defined not by inside and outside contours, but by a single, fluid raceway. Like most straightforward ideas, this one proved challenging to execute, but its puzzles were immensely satisfying to solve. Adding an inline to a typeface is the quickest way to reveal its secrets. All the furtive adjustments in weight and size that a type designer makes — relieving congestion by thinning the center arm of a bold E, or lightening the intersecting strokes of a W — are instantly exposed with the addition of a centerline. Adapting an existing alphabet to accommodate this inline called for renovating every single character (down to the capital I, the period, and even the space), in some cases making small adjustments to reallocate weight, at other times redesigning whole parts of the character set. The longer we worked on the typeface, the more we discovered opportunities to turn these constraints into advantages, solving stubbornly complex characters like € and § by redefining how an inline should behave, and using these new patterns to reshape the rest of the alphabet. The New Typeface The outcome is a typeface we’re calling Cesium. It shares many of Vitesse’s qualities, its heartbeat an energetic thrum of motorsports and industry, and it will doubtless be welcome in both hardware stores and Hollywood. But we’ve been surprised by Cesium’s more reflective moods, its ability to be alert and softspoken at the same time. Much in the way that vibrant colors can animate a typeface, we’ve found that Cesium’s sensitivity to spacing most effectively changes its voice. Tighter leading and tracking turns up the heat, heightening Cesium’s sporty, high-tech associations, but with the addition of letterspacing it achieves an almost literary repose. This range of voices recommends Cesium not only to logos, book covers, and title sequences, but to projects that regularly must adjust their volume, such as identities, packaging, and editorial design. Read more about how to use Cesium. About the Name Cesium is a chemical element, one of only five metals that’s liquid at room temperature. Resembling quicksilver, cesium is typically stored in a glass ampule, where the tension between a sturdy outer vessel and its volatile contents is scintillating. The Cesium typeface hopes to capture this quality, its bright and insistent inline restrained by a strong and sinuous container. Cesium is one of only three H&Co typefaces whose name comes from the periodic table, a distinction it shares with Mercury and Tungsten. At a time when I considered a more sci-fi name for the typeface, I learned that these three elements have an unusual connection: they’re used together in the propulsion system of nasa’s Deep Space 1, the first interplanetary spacecraft powered by an ion drive. I found the association compelling, and adopted the name at once, with the hope that designers might employ the typeface in the same spirit of discovery, optimism, and invention. —JH Featured in: Best Fonts for Logos