Pelican Books- Font Article-Fontke.com For Mobile

Pelican Books

News|Fonts in Use|Robin Rendle 2014-11-16 07:24:42

Matt Young, a designer at Penguin, Brandon TextandFreight Text. The latter is used as body copy, which is less than interesting since it seems to have flourished online as the default serif (whenever I read a website with Freight Text I immediately think of Medium). But here, it's clearly Brandon Text that steals the show. And this is interesting for a host of reasons, one being that I wrote a little review of the original typeface for Typographica earlier this year. I mentioned that:

A recurring disappointment of setting type on the web is seeing poor translations of families that were originally designed for print. Thankfully this is not the case here, yet the efforts in manually hinting and optimizing for screens are as likely to go unnoticed as the individual letters themselves. Designing text faces of this sort, then, is not a suitable profession for those in search of glory or prestige.

Going back to my review it's clear just how wrong my initial take on the typeface was – I assumed Brandon Text would be a quiet and subtle addition to any design. However the team at Penguin has clearly made this typeface flex every bit of its geometric muscles; at any distance this combination of color and fine typography makes each screen and graphic detail look glorious, perhaps even prestigious.

This design has shown me just how flexible some typefaces can be once we ask them to do strange and unfamiliar things.