Meet Fraunces, a new "Old Style" typeface family by Undercase Type Foundry

By Spencer Charles

In the early summer of 2018, Google Fonts approached us with the challenge of designing a display typeface. We spent some time perusing the catalog, and were struck by a pretty big gap in the typographic voices available. There isn't a specific name for this genre, but typefaces such as Cooper Black, Windsor, and Souvenir personify it. We call them “wonky” fonts in house, and that seems as good a name as any. We've played a lot with this style in our lettering work, and felt this was a great opportunity to create a typeface family that celebrates this genre. 

The origin of this genre traces its roots back to the Arts & Crafts experimentations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Golden Type by William Morris, and the extensive lettering of the Roycroft Guild drew upon a heavily romanticized ideal of an "Old Style" that their progress-besotted contemporaries had lost touch with. Morris' Golden Type was an extremely crude interpretation of the types of fifteenth-century printer Nicolas Jenson, opting instead to emphasize its usefulness as a wood type, rather than the calligraphic origins of the form.

Ironically, the letters they created, and the interest in wonky "Old Style" typefaces that followed it in subsequent decades – heavy hitting display typeface favorites like Cooper Black, Windsor or Clearface – had little or nothing to do with typefaces of antiquity. No one was really trying to score point for rigorous historical authenticity. Instead, these typefaces were playful, even outright goofy, a way to inject some personality into modernity. Even during this era, types like Richardson Old Style by Robert DeLittle showcased some of the more elegant possibilities of this expressive approach. 

During the 1970s, graphic designers were raiding style books and publications of earlier generations for looking for more funky stylings, and found a treasure trove in the “Old Style” types of the era. The irreverence and friendliness of these typefaces were the perfect countercultural antidote to the perceived stuffiness and chilly efficiency of traditional text faces. A prime example of this style coming out of the ’70s was Ed Benguiat's swashy version of Bookman for ITC. Benguiat’s type was an ode to Oswald Cooper's Cooper Black Italic. It’s known to most people today as the friendly typographical wave of the small businessperson to their regular customers: the ubiquitous "Thank You For Shopping With Us" that graces the sides of grocery bags all over North America. 


Mostly shunned since the 1990s as being vaguely tasteless and disreputable, there has been a twenty-first century revival of interest and use of these typefaces. With the advent of new type technology such as Variable Fonts, it's a great opportunity to update this genre with a typeface family that is made uniquely for our time. Please enjoy, and as ever, thank you for shopping with us.

## Your friend Fraunces 
## Fraunces: Try it, you’ll like it
Characteristics of Fraunces

Fraunces is not an Old Style typeface, but an "Old Style" typeface. It’s a genre of type that is less concerned with the sober and sensible construction of letterforms, and where personality is always paramount.

Within Fraunces are 4 axes: Weight, Goofy, Wonk, and Optical Size. Type designers in the past would provide fixed instances of an axis. In the Weight Axis, this is represented by Light, Regular, Bold, and Black weights. Variable Fonts allow granular control of each of these axes, and allows the user to access all the calculations in between.

## Goof it!
## Goofy vibes
## Born to be goofy
## Let’s get goofy
## Feelin’ goofy
Header for Goofy Axis

The Goofy axis controls the "wetness" or "goofiness" of the typeface. Although Fraunces is drawn entirely with rounded serifs, it achieves sharpness in the Goofy Min area of the design space with extremely high contrast.  

## Very heavy 
Header for Weight Axis (might be able to roll this in with Optical Axis)

The Weight Axis spans a range of weights from Thin (100), Light (200), Regular (400), Semibold (600), Bold (800), and Black (1000). Because Fraunces is built as a variable font, users can access all the calculations in between for a real fine-tuned approach.

## Ask me about my Optical Axis
## Have you thanked an Optical Axis today?
Header for Optical Axis

The Optical Size axis is similar to the Goofy, in that it controls the overall contrast between thicks and thins. The Optical Size axis goes a step further, however, and factors in additional changes depending on the size of the font. At smaller sizes, the letterspacing opens up, x-height increases, and contrast decreases to allow for easier reading. Additionally, at 18 pt/px and below, substitutions for the "wonky" characters are made automatically (see the Wonk Axis explanation below). Most modern web browsers will automatically interpret the Optical Size based on the font size specified by the website. Designing in applications such as Adobe Illustrator or Sketch requires a manual approach to typesetting. 

## When the going gets wonky, the wonky turn pro
## Wonky is beautiful
Header for Wonk Axis

The Wonk axis controls the substitution of “wonky” characters. These substitutions automatically switch at smaller sizes (18 pt. and below), but can be toggled manually at larger optical sizes. The leaning h, n, and m is a characteristic borrowed from Windsor. In addition to the leaning characters, the Italic contains flagged characters with ball terminals.

## World party
## Global scene
## Visualize world language support
## Since we’re neighbors, let’s be friends
Header for Extended Language Support

Fraunces supports a wide range of languages for global and local audiences.

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General call outs / buttons (and variations on any of the unused preceding headers could work)

We love our customers
How are we doing?
Just looking
A touch of class
Be reasonable, do it my way
Smoking stinks
Ask me about wonky fonts
Share wonky fonts
Trust me, I’m a typographer
Ed Benguiat lives!

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404 messages:

Sorry, Bilbo, your journey has ended
Unfortunately, your browser does not support variable fonts.

Suffering is part of the training program for wisdom.
Unfortunately, your browser does not support variable fonts.

Bummer.
Unfortunately, your browser does not support variable fonts.

Hang in there.
Unfortunately, your browser does not yet support variable fonts.
