The design of
Journal started as an exploration into the unknown. In 1990, the selection of fonts for the personal computer was still slim. So Licko set out to design a serif typeface for Emigre magazine to broaden our selection of text faces, which at the time were her Triplex, Matrix, and coarse resolution bitmap fonts.
Licko wanted to try her hand at an old style stress design, but found the curves difficult to draw with the relatively primitive font tools of the day. The geometric arc curves employed in Triplex, Matrix, and other designs that she had designed previously were easier to create with these early tools because arc curves are more predictable from a construction standpoint and therefore easier to envision. In fact, it was not so much the drawing tools that were the problem, but the preview display. The screen display was not very faithful to the mathematical digital drawing, nor the laser printout, due to the primitive screen rasterizer, and the coarse resolution screen on the monitor. Remember, this was before anti-aliased screens and stochastic ink jet printing came to personal computing.
Taking a magnifying glass to the 300 dpi printouts, Licko studied how the curves were represented by a series of stair stepped lines on the black and white (non-aliased) grid of the laser printed page. This inspired the designer to construct her new typeface with straight line segments instead of curves; approximating each curve by a series of tangent polylines. This not only solved the screen display preview problem, but gave
Journal a rustic look, which nicely complimented the old style stress. The subtle crudeness is reminiscent of the irregularities that appear in letterpress printed specimens, and evokes informal qualities, making
Journal suitable for correspondence.”
Emigre Fonts is a digital type foundry and publisher of type specimens and artist books based in Berkeley, California. From 1984 until 2005 Emigre published the legendary Emigre magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to visual communication. The Emigre font library features more than 600 original typefaces, including Mrs Eaves, Brothers, Matrix and Filosofia.
Supported languages: German, Spanish, Dutch, English, Polish, Russian, French, Czech, Swedish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Slovenian, Maltese, Arabic, Devanagari, Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, Chinese (hk), Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Turkish, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Bengali, Kannada, Cherokee, Thai, Armenian, Belarusian, Danish, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Serbian, Telugu, Malayalam, IPA, Latvian, Chinese Pinyin, Finnish, Filipino, Malay, Croatian, Kazakh, Romanian, Persian, Indonesian, Slovak, Hindi
File Size: 1.24 MB
Release date: June 23, 2016
You can use this font for:
- Design projects: create images or vector artwork, including logos
- Website publishing: create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website
- PDFs: embed fonts in PDFs for viewing and printing
- Video and broadcast: use fonts to create in-house or commercial video content and more
- The fonts are designed to work on MacOS (Apple) and Windows (Microsoft)
Download now