Drop Caps happen. They started off life as decorated initials way back when in the days of illuminated manuscripts. Then printing came and they became the work of the rubricators and then somewhere soon after printing began, at least by the 1490’s, they were printed directly into the text. This then is a collection of over a hundred glyphs from that closing decade of the Incunabula period. All of them are based on examples found in the works printed by Michael Wenssler in Basel. This font also contains a few useful pointing hands and a set of spacing characters.

Savigny began as an offshoot of Le Havre. Le Havre met my design objective of a geometric sans serif with a strong art deco touch. Le Havre’s primary inspiration came from the art deco titling of the 1930’s, and the lower case was just icing. The art of the 1930’s is of particular interest to me, and I love the art deco era and its art, and the simplicity of geometric shapes. I am mostly interested in designing display typefaces. In many ways Le Havre was the exact opposite of another popular insigne offering, Aviano Sans. Le Havre has very high ascenders, a lower case and is very condensed. Aviano Sans has no lowercase and extremely extended capitals. With the rise of webfonts I began to see Le Havre being used frequently online. It’s short x-height and very tall ascenders made it difficult to read in on screen text settings as it was intended as display type. With this observation, I felt that there is more room for a geometric sans in the insigne catalog. So I set about to design a new geometric sans using the successful skeleton of the Le Havre family. Although I planned to extend the Le Havre line, the new family is so drastically different I decided on a new name: Savigny. The face evolved and began to take on a few humanist touches. Designed from the very beginning as a webfont, the design is open and pleasing to the eye, with a tall x-height. To optimize it for onscreen settings, the spacing is generous. In addition, it includes extended and condensed members, making it insigne’s first superfamily. The family includes over 100 OpenType alternate characters. These include several style sets. Some are stemless, others are purely geometric, and in a nod to Savigny’s origins, Art Deco titling alternates. Please see the informative .pdf brochure to see these features in action. OpenType capable applications such as Quark or the Adobe suite can take full advantage of the automatically replacing ligatures and alternates. This family also includes the glyphs to support a wide range of languages. Savigny is a great choice for a professional designer who wants a well rounded typeface family that is ready for the web.

BRANDFORD is a simple sans serif font with ligatures and alternates. It was purposely crafted to be used in large point sizes, although it doesn’t lose its magic in small point sizes. It is perfectly suited for designing unique logos & brands, bold packaging, powerful website headers, and so much more! With tons of ligatures, alternates, and other features to choose from, you can make your project stand out from the rest.