Features. Optical Sizes. To preserve the typefaces’ delicate features, each of Requiem’s styles is provided in three different versions to tackle different size ranges. The two Requiem Ornaments fonts (one for small sizes and one for large) contain two sets of decorative “cartouche” alphabets in period style, and an assortment of printers’ flowers. Italic Ligatures. Each of Requiem’s italics includes a set of 75 decorative ligatures, which range from the familiar (fl) to the exotic (stfj) to the downright dubious (fffl). Special Characters.
In every optical size, Requiem contains a wealth of decorative alternates for its romans, italics, and small caps. Language Support. Requiem features our Latin-X™ character set, covering more than 140 languages throughout the world — including all of Central Europe.
Date created 1914 Date released 1929 Also known as Metropolitan Centaur is a typeface by book and typeface designer, based on the -period printing of around 1470. He used it for his design of the.
OPTI Fonts Archive Fonts by Castcraft Software. Cristeta Italic Cristeta Light Italic Cristeta Bold Italic Cristeta Extra Bold Italic Crystal. Original is Centaur/Arrighi. Cuba Libre Cuba Libre Italic Cuba Libre Two Cuba Libre Two Italic. Original is Carlton. Download Opti Font. All of our type is cast from.050' drive English Monotype matrices for two reasons. First, the deeper drive lends a greater strength so the type endures the letterpress 'punch,' particularly necessary for well-kerned italic characters.
It was given widespread release by the British branch of, paired with an designed by calligrapher and based on the slightly later work of calligrapher and printer. The italic has sometimes been named separately as the 'Arrighi' italic. Centaur is an elegant and quite slender design, lighter on the page than Jenson's work and most other revivals, an effect possibly amplified in the digital release compared to the metal type. It has been popular in fine book printing and is often used both for printing body text and especially titles and headings. One of its most notable uses has been in the designs of, who have regularly used it for titling.
Jenson's roman type, from a 1475 edition. Rogers' primary influence was 's 1470 Eusebius, considered the model for the modern upright printing of the Roman alphabet, which Rogers studied through enlarged photographs. Centaur also shows the influence of types cut by in 1495 for a small book titled De Aetna written.
The typeface is classified as belonging to the style of designs, based on the predominant influence of Jenson's work. The style is also called for the city Jenson worked in during his career as a printer.
In the late nineteenth century, Jenson's work had become a popular model for and then other fine printers of the. Morris commissioned a copying Jenson's work, and several other revivals and imitations of Morris' work had followed by 1914. Arrighi's, ca. At the time italic capitals had not been invented, but were always upright in the tradition. Italics did not exist in Jenson's time, and so the inspiration for Centaur's italic comes from thirty years later, in the calligraphy and printing of. Arrighi was a Rome-based calligrapher who made the transition to working in printing, releasing a writing manual, La operina', and other printed works. These used an italic font presumably based on his calligraphy.
It inspired later French italic types from 1528 onwards. Revival Rogers' revival was originally drawn as titling capitals in 1914 for the.
![Arrighi Italic Font Arrighi Italic Font](http://www.designhistory.org/Handwriting_pages/imagewriting/Arrighi.png)
Rogers later expanded it, adding lower case, for his 1915 limited edition of 's The Centaur. For the original release, matrices were cut by and the type was privately cast. Some years later, the commissioned Rogers to release it for the general market. Rogers did not feel able to create a matching, and asked the calligrapher if he could pair Centaur with a design Warde had created based upon ’s 1520 chancery face, made in 1926 for the.
Warde's design had the separate name Arrighi, which appears in some earlier specimens. Centaur & Arrighi at text size The completed family was released for general use in 1929, with a first showing in Monotype's specimen booklet The Trained Printer and the Amateur. Monotype described it as a 'long- type of great distinction', emphasising its feeling of not having been restricted to allow tighter linespacing, as other types often had been in the hot metal period. Monotype has sold the design with bold and bold italic designs (their invention, since bold type did not exist until much later), and italic alternate characters.
Centaur shows some of the irregularities of early type compared to later designs. The of the i and j are very visibly shifted to the right, a feature of Jenson's original design. The horizontal stroke of the 'e' is slanted, not exactly horizontal as came to be the norm in print. On the other hand, while based on study of Jenson's work, Centaur is a deliberately loose imitation, more slender (especially in the serifs) than Jenson's original.
It also modernises Jenson's two-way serifs on the top of the 'M' in favour of one-way serifs. In addition, the italic capitals slope in the modern tradition, which was established after Arrighi's time in the later 16th century. Monotype advisor and historian of printing, who was influential in Monotype's series of revival designs of the 1920s and 30s, described Centaur in his book A Tally of Types as 'a freehand emphasis of the calligraphic basis of the original' and its modernisation 'a concession to contemporary sense'.
Sebastian Carter calls it 'an imaginative recreation'. Digitisations Centaur has been digitised, both by Monotype in collaboration with Adobe, and by LTC, who assumed the rights to many Lanston (American) Monotype typefaces, under the name of Metropolitan.
The revivals have slightly different features; Monotype’s having a bold and bold italic and swash caps and LTC’s having a more complex, less smooth digitisation with many italic alternates and complementary ornaments. At least two incomplete open-source digital typefaces, Museum and Coelacanth, are based on Centaur.
Related fonts Other Monotype fonts of the hot metal period inspired by Renaissance printing included the very popular (with a roman based on a slightly later font used by ), Lutetia by (a more personal design, as opposed to a direct revival) and the post-war. Among other Venetian revivals, is a notable and extremely complete digital revival from 1996 with features such as fonts for different text sizes. 's began revivals of the Jenson style in 1892 with a more solid structure (no matching italic was created for it); other Jenson interpretations included the while ATF's Satanick was a direct imitation of it. ' was created by its design team led by around 1915, during the same period as Centaur.
Ludlow created another release with italic under the direction of and in the 1920s. Also issued a very eccentric Jenson revival inspired by the work of Morris which is little-known today. Created a revival in 1994 named that is bundled with some Microsoft software, adding his own italic design. Usage Outside its common uses, Centaur is also used for the of and in the children's book, set in the Middle Ages.
References. Modern font designer Juliet Shen comments on Jenson's books that 'A type designer looking at the Eusebius font is struck at once by how difficult it is to envision what the actual type looked like from its inked impression. Details are obscured: the stroke terminals and serifs are rounded from ink spread. So the first task of interpretation must be to decide what the skeletal form of each letter may have been before imper- fect printing added a layer of disguise.'
. Arrighi's book had a complex publication history apparently involving a dispute between Arrighi and his publisher, making its dating and printing location(s) both somewhat involved.
It is believed to have been published in Rome and Venice between 1522 and 1525. Centaur's italic is one of several based on the work of Arrighi created by Monotype in the 1920s, including the italic. Bembo's default italic is based on the work of Arrighi's contemporary, another calligrapher-turned-printer. Blackwell, Lewis.
20th Century Type. Yale University Press: 2004. Fiedl, Frederich, Nicholas Ott and Bernard Stein. Typography: An Encyclopedic Survey of Type Design and Techniques Through History. Black Dog & Leventhal: 1998. Lawson, Alexander S.,. Godine: 1990.
Meggs, Philip B. And Rob Carter. Typographic Specimens: The Great Typefaces. Wiley: 1993. Meggs, Philip B.
And McKelvey, Roy. Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces. RC Publications: 2000. Updike, Daniel Berkeley.
Printing Types Their History, Forms and Use. Dover Publications, Inc: 1937, 1980. External links Bruce Rogers:. September 2016 book on the history of Centaur by Jerry Kelly & Misha Beletsky Professional digitisations:.
the LTC digitisation with many italic alternates and small caps in regular and italic, but no bold as in the original or swash caps. (includes swash letters in italic and small caps in the regular style only). alternative Fontsite release; name changed for legal reasons, basic character set Amateur projects:. — Unfinished open-source implementation with.
— Unfinished open-source implementation by, but no italics. (1930). (1930). (1930). (1931). Leysbourne. Placard.
Kino. Script. Falstaff. Inflex. Littleworth.
(1932). Zarotto/Mardersteig (1932). Monoline Script. (1933). Jocunda (1933). (1934). Colmcille.
Runic. Menhart. Felix Titling (1934). Van Dijck (1935). Fontana (for Collins) (1935). Grock (1935).
(for the Greynog Press) (1935). (1936).
(1936). (1935-9). (for R & R Clark) (1937).
![Arrighi italic type Arrighi italic type](http://luc.devroye.org/Berthold--BruceRogers+FredericWarde-ArrighiBQItalicOsF-1928-1930.gif)
(for J.M. Dent) (1937). (1937). Van Dijck (1937). (1937). Matura (1938). Palace and Dorchester Script (1938) 1940s.