Baroque Text
Baroque Text was created over a long period of time. It took me just shy of a year to complete the font starting in Summer of 2001. Upon completion in late Spring of 2002, the font was released for commercial sale at MyFonts.com and eventually became part of the Jukebox library in 2003.
The font was inspired by a hand lettered typeface in a “how to” manual on calligraphy and pen lettering from the 1950s.
Baroque Text is a sample of what’s known as a “Blackletter” font. Blackletter is a style of typeface that includes what we think of as “Old English” or sometimes mistakenly called Gothic, which actually has a different meaning in typography. The correct term for these kinds of fonts is Blackletter, and they often carry the term “text” in their name. They originally started in the abbeys where monks would write and illuminate manuscripts by hand. When Gutenberg’s movable type printing press came along in 1439, the first metal type was still done in this style to keep with tradition.
Because Blackletter type grew out of a tradition of handlettering, it is easy to see that the forms of the letters reflect their calligraphic origin. The thick and thin strokes are the types of marks that would be made by an angled calligraphy pen.
While keeping with this tradition, Baroque Text is much more of a fanciful display face than a font meant for setting long text passages. The elaborate forms and curlycues of the letters was what prompted me to call the font Baroque Text.
Because of the long standing association of Blackletter fonts with fairy tales, holidays and mysterious long-ago times, this font has been a very popular one for those type of applications. Disneyland has used Baroque Text on quite a few of its theme park merchandise, shirts and hats…particularly related to the princesses of the Disney canon.
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Baroque Text is part of the Jukebox Library available exclusively from Veer. It is now available in OpenType .ttf and .otf formats.
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