Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Font of the Week #19: Cabernet Regular and Italic

   Good morning! Here we are at another Tuesday so it’s time for the Font of the Week. This week’s font is the “Cabernet” family from Jukebox…one of my favorite digital revivals that I have created.

Cabernet Regular and Italic

   The Cabernet family from Jukebox consists of two “pro” OpenType fonts that were adapted from an original set of four PostScript fonts. The swash variants that used to be in separate font files are now included in the OpenType versions, making the fonts much easier to use.


   Cabernet is a digital revival of an old photo-typositing face based on heavy weight supposedly Caslon-style type. However, this font has a lot of Modern attributes to it…the heavy contrast between the thick and thin strokes as well as the vertical stroke axis. It does however retain the bracketed serifs of Caslon (Transitional) types.

   These types of font are fantastic for display usage and they were very popular in the 1960s and 1970s giving them a look that seems to fit with that era. Particularly when the Swash variants are used. There is nothing more fun than designing swash letters to go with a font. They add vigor and liveliness to a typeface, and the Cabernet fonts are no exception.


   These fonts were created in the spring of 2003 and released commercially from Veer as part of the Jukebox library that summer. They can be seen in the September 2003 catalog where they were used extensively. Veer used to send out beautifully printed catalogs each month which unfortunately are no longer produced.

   The Cabernet fonts are widely recognizable, as the original photo-typositing fonts they were based on were used for the posters for the 1974 film “Foxy Brown” (among many others!). These types of serif swash fonts are among my favorites as they connect me with my first memories of admiring typefaces when I was a child.




   Cabernet Regular and Italic are part of the Jukebox library and are available from Veer.com

 

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