Suburban was VanderLans’ first attempt at the design of a complete typeface. The basic character ideas were sketched out by hand and then digitally redrawn and completed by Zuzana Licko.
Like many designers who design their first font, VanderLans’ goal was to incorporate into one design all of those components from other typefaces that the designer always admired. This led to a cross between Futura and the vernacular scripts you might find on the jersey of your local softball team. The final typeface, therefore, is a combination of fairly rational, geometric shapes sprinkled throughout with whimsical and calligraphy-inspired letterforms.
Designing
Suburban also functioned as catharsis, an opportunity that allowed VanderLans to disprove (at least to himself) some of the basic notions he had learned in art school regarding traditional type design.
Suburban would be considered a “vermicelli” font, a typeface lacking the necessary visible contrast and stresses between counters and strokes and/or optical corrections to make it a useful typeface. All valid notions, if your goal is to attain the highest level of legibility, but by no means the only route to making type that communicates.
As it becomes increasingly difficult to create original typeface designs, VanderLans is proud to report that
Suburban can lay claim to being the only typeface in existence today that uses an upside down lower case “l” as a “y.” Creativity knows no bounds.
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: 17.30 MB
Release date: June 23, 2016
You can use this font for:
- Design projects: create images or vector artwork, including logos
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- The fonts are designed to work on MacOS (Apple) and Windows (Microsoft)
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