Nick Shinn's Modern Suite Type Series comprises the Figgins Sans and Scotch Modern font families in OpenType Pro format (OTF), a masterfully detailed set of revivals which include multiple stylistic sets and numeral forms. The Modern Suite OpenType Pro fonts support Western and CE encodings, Cyrillic (with Bulgarian alternates) and Polytonic Greek. There are many special features, including small caps, unicase, italic swash capitals, ten sets of figures per font, and both slashed and nut (vertical) fractions.
More…The first sans serif types were made in London in the early 19th century. They were severely modern, all caps and bold. The Figgins foundry, inventor of the term sans serif, showed a fine example in its specimen of 1836. The extra bold weight of Figgins Sans is a close revival of the original, with the addition of a lower case which retains its partly geometric, partly grotesque quality. The family is rounded out with other weights and an italic, and extended into Cyrillic and Greek, all executed in what is assumed to be as authentic a manner as possible, given the hypothetical nature of the exercise.
To meet the burgeoning demands of commerce, type founders in 1830s London introduced a plethora of new fonts which abandoned the traditional nib-informed model. Most radical were bold, capital-only designs with almost no stroke contrast, stripped bare of serifs. To all intents and purposes these minimal expressions of utility were identical to 20th century functionalism. Recontextualizing one of the original sans fonts, Shinn offers an alternative proposition to the conventional myth of modernism.
Scotch Modern is Shinn's revival of the typeface used in the book New York State Cabinet of Natural History. This beautiful genre of type, so popular in books, magazines and advertisements during the Victorian era and much of the 20th century, was derided by advocates of both the Arts & Crafts movement and 20th century modernists, and has never been properly adapted to hot metal, phototype, or digital media... until now.
Download the beautifully detailed 5MB Modern Suite PDF specimen.
The Scotch Modern 5 style font family (without Micro styles) can be bought separately here. The Scotch Micro family (4 font styles) can be bought on its own here.
To test, buy and download Modern Suite single fonts in OpenType Pro (OTF/CFF format) click on the individual fonts listed below:
