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Christian Schwartz has partnered with Paul Barnes to form Commercial Type, a new type foundry based in London and New York. Please click here to visit our site.
RETAIL FONTS
CUSTOM FONTS
Please note that, except where indicated, these typefaces are not available for licensing.
Publications:
Amplitude Classified
Amplitude Headline
Big Black Book Stencil
Brunel
Caponi
Farnham Headline
Houston
Kaiser (NEW)
Popular
Corporate Design:
Bosch
Deutsche Bahn
Eero
Empire State Building
Harrison
Munich Re Group
Symantec
UNFINISHED
EARLY WORK
ABOUT
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2004-2005. Commissioned by Mark Porter at The Guardian. Designed with Paul Barnes. Available for licensing from Commercial Type.
When Paul sent me his first rough sketches for the Egyptian, I knew we had finally landed in the right spot, and with each new round of prototypes, the Egyptian became more and more central to The Guardian's new look. It works almost everywhere a sans would work, so as far as I know, news pages use it for all display typography. The extreme range of weights gave us some interesting problems to solve, like how to keep the serifs in the Hairline weight looking the the wedge-shaped serifs in the rest of the family (the answer was to taper them ever so slightly), and how to make the Black as heavy and tight as possible without ruining its legibility (the answer here was to draw a separate Condensed Ultra, with true slab serifs and stiffer curves on the bowls).
The italic is willfully bizarre. Mark pushed us to make it do its own thing and not worry too much about how it would look in mixed settings with the roman, because it is mostly going to be used for pullquotes and headlines, so it needed to add another texture and mood to the type palette. Paul pushed it in the direction of a Granjon italic dressed up as an Egyptian, and we never looked back. I've heard it described as "barking mad, but quite likable", and I think that's about right.
We also built special dropcap fonts, scaled and spaced to work with the text faces without any adjustments, in the two extreme weights. The only difficult challenge to making these was getting the Q to work.
Hairline, Thin, Light, Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold, and Black weights, with italics.
More about each part of the family:
Guardian Egyptian
Guardian Sans
Guardian Text Egyptian
Guardian Text Sans
Guardian Agate
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