Venice on the Prairieĭespite the corn-fed sound of its name, Iowan Old Style has roots deep in the Renaissance Downer says it’s a Venetian old style, based on the types cut by Nicolas Jenson and Francesco Griffo in 15th-century Italy. This Bitstream promotional graphic highlights Iowa Old Style’s newly released small caps. Now, nearly a decade later, Bitstream has finally released them, making Iowan Old Style usable at last in the way its designer intended. But when the face was released in 1991 by Bitstream, it was missing the expert sets and related typographic refinements that Downer had designed to make it a complete type family. In 1990, lettering expert John Downer designed a deceptively simple-looking family of serif typefaces, called Iowan Old Style, that should have become a workhorse text type for book and magazine work.
Versatile, readable, well-designed typefaces for text are hard to come by. You can find more from John at his website.
#Old century font download#
If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.Įventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. Dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D.