Sildetas is an elegant high-contrast script face. Sildetas was conceived as non-connected, high-contrast and ultra heavy script, as best exemplified by the Black weight. However, it was too much of a temptation to design a hairline variant, and this exploration gave the family’s lighter weights an elegant, graceful feel. The script was modified further to use connected letterforms as the primary glyphs. With its unique swirled ball terminals, this versatile script draws immediate attention. The face glides and flows across the page and the swirling ball terminals provide an interesting diversion to the flow. The lighter weights have an almost spencerian look. Sildetas includes six weights and is a very unique script face. Lighter weights can be used for elegant invitiations. Sildetas can get the job done for many unique design tasks. Sildetas includes many useful OpenType features, including a set of non-connecting and titling alternates, ligatures, and two types of end swashes. Opentype features include simplified swashed stylistic alternates without ball terminals, swash endings, ending contextual alternates, discretionary ligatures, ligatures and five different stylistic sets filled with alternates. In total, there are over 60 alternate letterforms. 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.

In the early 1980s, at the start of my career, I had the opportunity to work in a print shop with classic lead setting. In those days I would study issues of U&lc magazine from ITC. What really caught my attention were scripts in the Spencerian style. I’ve been fascinated by this American penmanship tradition ever since. A few years ago I developed a font. Boris Bencic used it when he was redesigning L’Officiel magazine in Paris. I took these initial forms and developed them into the font Mommie when I started my own foundry. Although I usually design text typefaces, working on Mommie taught me how complex it can be to create a script headline font. The biggest challenge in this process has been to keep it alive and fresh. The Regular weight is only made for very big headlines. The thin lines with the bold drops are very elegant. For smaller sizes use the Medium and Small weight. It won the TDC 2008 award and was Judges Choice of Christian Schwartz.