Plantin Font

Plantin font family is a renaissance Roman as viewed through an eye of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Its forms are intended to reflect the high aesthetic standard of book typography in the sixteenth century while considering the application of mechanical typesetting as well as mass production. How did this anomalous design occur? In 1912 Frank Hinman Pierpont of English Monotype was visiting the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp and brought back to America the knowledge of type founding, hundreds of photographs and a stack of old type specimen including a few examples of Robert Granjon.

With Fritz Stelzer of the Monotype Drawing Office, Pierpont acquired one of these over inked proofs from worn type to be used as the basis for a new text face for machine composition. The text in Plantin is well-suited to bodywork, with a dense, somewhat sombre appearance ideal for printed editorial and book projects, but it’s also quite effective on screen. As a result of its background the message that it conveys creates an impression of importance and credibility. The family has four text weights with small caps and italics and a four-weight condensed headline font and a titling font in caps only.