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Hoefler&Co is one of the most iconic names in type design. Explore Decimal, Mercury Display, and Sentinel. [MyFonts.com]( [View in Browser]( Explore Hoefler&Co Hoefler&Co is one of the most iconic names in type design, having designed the fonts that give voice to many of the world’s foremost institutions, publications, causes, and brands. [Hot New Fonts]( [Best Sellers]( [What's New]( [Special Offers]( [Bundles]( [WhatTheFont]( [Decimal®]( Decimal® by Hoefler&Co About Decimal Font Family Nearly all wristwatches once shared a distinctive form of lettering. It was confident, and timeless, and it’s almost completely vanished. Decimal examines this style, and explores the things that shaped it, to create a family of original typefaces that transcends its forms to celebrate its ideas. The Decimal typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Sara Soskolne in 2019. Inspired by the markings on wristwatches, whose open gestures and dilated corners help create clear shapes at small sizes, Decimal was designed to preserve a vanishing and recognizable quality of horology driven nearly to extinction by digital fonts. Decimal first appeared in 2019, in an episode of the Netflix documentary ‘Abstract: The Art of Design’ devoted to Hoefler and his work, and in 2020 became the signature typeface of both the Biden–Harris campaign and the Biden White House. From the desk of the designer: One of the telltale signs of a vintage watch is its lettering. The unique markings on watch dials, surprisingly consistent from one manufacturer to the next, evolved separately from typography: these are forms unconcerned with the needs of type designed for printing words on paper, and unmoved by the changing fashions of graphic design. Instead, watch lettering has been shaped by the curious technologies of dial manufacturing, the demanding requirements of working in miniature, and the unusual commercial arrangements that first gave rise to these remarkable inventions. Some signature gestures of the watchmakers’ alphabet were innovations that evolved to suit new technological features. The broad swing of the letter J, uncharacteristically topped by a serif, helps to make the letter wider, ensuring that narrow-lettered months like July and wide-lettered ones like March will occupy the same space on a calendar wheel. Elsewhere on a watch, alphabets are usually smaller, relegated to marking the scale of a tachymeter or telemeter, or identifying a watch as a chronograph or chronometer. The Swiss domination of the industry ensures the letters S and W on most dials (useful bellwethers for the typeface designer) but here the material ends. Few watches ever included lowercase or italics, save the occasional Km on a telemeter dial, or water resistance indicated in ft or m; punctuation beyond periods and ampersands is similarly absent. But even among the realm of garden-variety capitals, every watch reveals inherent contradictions and short-sighted decisions that limit the potential for a truly authentic typographic revival of the style, guaranteeing early that Decimal would be an interpretation and a celebration of the style, but not a replica. One of the charms of lettering is its inconsistency. Where a typeface is a fixed system designed to deploy in predictable ways, lettering has the flexibility to adapt to its circumstances. At the small scale of the wristwatch, these circumstances can be extreme: in this Brietling Top Time (ref. 810), the G on the top line has a curved construction, but the one below it — just 20% smaller — uses fully horizontal gestures to maintain an open aperture between the two nearby strokes. The dogged type designer may be left to choose between these two models, or to conclude that this beloved aesthetic is the product of these differences, and that no single alphabet could possibly deliver the attractive diversity of the vintage watch. For Decimal, we tried a third approach. Instead of trying to reproduce the anarchic (and sometimes impractical) letters from actual watches, Decimal dissects the style into discrete themes, reassembling them in a different but more useful order. In the Breitling watch above, each model of letter G has its own merit: one is welcoming in its roundness, the other fierce in its geometry. Decimal applies these ideas in different places, so that they become less discordant, and more widely applicable throughout the typeface. In Decimal, open-armed roundness is evoked by curving the letter’s jaw, intensity by shearing its top stroke at a dramatic angle that ends in a sharp point. These decisions point the way to resolving the letter S (often awkward on watch dials), and the letter Q (generally absent.) Wherever they could be employed consistently, and harnessed to serve a range of ten weights, idiosyncratic details have been retained, from the J with its unexpected serif, to the wide plateau on the A. The vestigial serifs on watch dials, never appearing with much consistency, are referenced in the angled arms of letters like E, reified into a subtle but perceptible motif that recurs throughout the design. [Shop Decimal]( [Mercury® Display]( Mercury® Display by Hoefler&Co About Mercury Display Font Family A succinct family of display faces, Mercury answers the call for a contemporary serif that’s smart, quick, and articulate. The Mercury typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 1996. A loose adaptation of the sparkling baroque typefaces of Johann Michael Fleischman (1701-1768), Mercury was an inflection point in Hoefler’s typefaces, in which explicit historical revivals pivoted to more expressive interpretations inspired by historical themes. First appearing in the pages of Esquire in 1997, Mercury is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From the desk of the designer: The signature typeface we designed for Esquire magazine began its life as a would-be historical revival but developed into one of our most avowedly modern type families. During its initial design exploration, Mercury was envisioned as a revival of the work of Johann Michael Fleischman (1701-1768), a German punchcutter denizened in Amsterdam, whose unrevived typefaces had so expressively captured the drama and tension of the Dutch baroque. As Mercury’s design developed, it began to draw upon the work of other contemporary punchcutters: both the sparkling display faces of Jacques-François Rosart (1714-1774), and the progressive italics of Pierre Simon Fournier (1712-1768), were inspirations in Mercury’s evolving design. The more time we spent with these historical models, the more it became clear that none of them truly possessed the qualities that were so exciting about the genre as a whole. As a collection, these faces were vibrant: tightly wound, yet quiet, using the tension between introverted and extroverted gestures — and between black letterforms and their white counters — to create a sort of “excited calm” on the page. It was these qualities that we hoped to capture in Mercury, so ultimately, we chose to ignore the dictates of historical form and follow a more personal and expressive path instead. Mercury debuted in the pages of Esquire in 1996, and though it had been designed to serve merely as an everyday headline font, it quickly became an indispensable part of the magazine’s painterly editorial openers. The sharp corners and tightly coiled curves that made Mercury lively at headline sizes made it irresistible in outsize typographic collages and hinted at what we thought could potentially be a vibrant and hard-working text face as well. Rather than compromise the design’s crisp features, we explored these ideas separately, in what would become one of our most substantial type families: the high-performance Mercury Text collection, designed to thrive under all kinds of adverse conditions. [Shop Mercury Display]( [Sentinel®]( Sentinel® by Hoefler&Co About Sentinel Font Family For everyone who’s ever wished Clarendons had italics, everyone whose favorite slab serif is shy a few weights, and everyone who’s ever needed a slab serif to thrive in text: we designed Sentinel for you. The Sentinel typeface was designed by Jonathan Hoefler in 2004. In the early nineteenth century, typefounders seeking novelty invented a freakish new category of typefaces with extreme weight, heightened contrast between thick and thin strokes, and stocky, unbracketed serifs. This style, which became known as ‘antique,’ would rise to prominence in the decades ahead, when these faces were paired with lighter typefaces in order to signal emphasis: they became the world’s first ‘boldface’ types. Sentinel updates and expands the antique genre to include both romans and italics, and a set of ornaments in period style. Created for Texas Monthly, in whose pages the typeface first appeared in 2004. First published in 2009, the Sentinel family was expanded in 2020 to include a broader character set, and two fonts of ornaments. From the desk of the designer: The first slab serifs were designed to be oddities. It was their intention to be eye-catching, to be novelties amidst the world’s conventional book types. Never mind that some of these faces treated different letters inconsistently or had inherent qualities that limited the size of their families: these were eccentricities, and to a novelty typeface, eccentricity is strength. Two centuries later, their legacy includes three beloved species of typeface that are handsome, popular, and maddeningly difficult to use. Each is marred by a crippling deficiency, a situation inspiring us to create Sentinel. A slab serif whose capital O is close to a perfect circle is called a Geometric. Its capital H will have horizontal and vertical strokes that appear the same weight, a policy that’s consistently applied throughout the entire alphabet. If the strokes are inflated beyond a certain weight, it becomes impossible to create a matching lowercase: the structural complexity of the lowercase a, e and g limits how heavy the design can go before these characters close in on themselves. The Geometric that maxes out at the Bold weight can only achieve a Black by compromising the underlying design, and in a typeface characterized by rigid geometries, these kinds of concessions can be glaringly obvious. An early compromise was the introduction of contrast, which allowed horizontal strokes to remain thinner than vertical ones. This approach, which made it possible to create lowercase letters in extreme weights, proved to be an attractive motif among the capitals as well, and the resulting style became popular under the name Antique. A cousin of the Antique is the Clarendon, which adds rounded brackets that connect its serifs and stems, a useful feature that gives bolder faces the appearance of extra weight. These brackets are consequently a liability in lighter weights, where they begin to overpower the letters themselves, and in counterpoint to Geometrics that lack heavier weights, Clarendons rarely have lighter ones. Their absence of a Book weight makes Clarendons useless for text, a fate sealed by a greater problem which they share with Antiques: neither have italics. Sentinel was designed to address the many shortcomings of the classical slab serif. Unbound by traditions that deny italics, by technologies that limit its design, or by ornamental details that restrict its range of weights, Sentinel is a fresh take on this useful and lovely style, offering for the first time a complete family that’s serviceable for both text and display. From the Antique style it borrows a program of contrasting thicks and thins but trades that style’s frumpier mannerisms for more attractive contemporary details. It improves on both Clarendons and Geometrics by including a complete range of styles, six weights from Light to Black that are consistent in both style and quality. Planned from the outset to flourish in small sizes as well as large, Sentinel contains features like short-ranging figures that make it a dependable choice for text. And most mercifully, it includes thoughtfully designed italics across its entire range of weights. [Shop Sentinel]( Explore all [Hoefler&Co]( fonts. Monotype Imaging Inc. 600 Unicorn Park Drive Woburn, MA 01801 USA London, UK | Berlin, DE | Noida, IN | Seoul, KR | Tokyo, JP | Shanghai, CN The promotions featured in this email newsletter are only valid for purchases made online at MyFonts.com. MyFonts and MyFonts.com are trademarks of MyFonts Inc. registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and may be registered in certain other jurisdictions. Other technologies, font names, and brand names are used for information only and remain trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Decimal®, Sentinel®, and Mercury® Display are registered trademarks of The Hoefler Type Foundry, Inc. Prices are shown in our standard currency (USD), may differ in other currencies, and may also be subject to change due to exchange rate fluctuations. ©2023 Monotype. All rights reserved. The text in this email is set in Rooney Sans. [Unsubscribe]( | [Preferences]( | [Privacy Policy]( | [View in Browser](