Two-Tone Type from the Hoefler Type Foundry

I've always wanted to add a font like one of these to my site, but registration (the print kind) is so problematic in quick-printing.

Along the same lines, Sumner Stone had an interesting two-part font called something like Means & Ends, though I can't find an example of it online. As the name suggests, the letterform ends (including long serifs) were in one font while the body shapes, disconnected lines mostly, were in another.

For some reason I thought Cina's font Trisect was meant to be multi-color.

I wonder if theres any sort of color trapping built in to typefaces like these to combat the registration problem, does anyone know?

You can simply apply an outline stroke in Illustrator to get overprint.

We thought about building in trapping to our Shades series, in part because our catalogs don't have the most reliable color registration. What I quickly discovered is that properly spreading and choking two outlines really only works if you make certain assumptions about color -- for instance, that an inline is printing in color, and the surrounding outline is printing in black. And more profoundly, chokes are measured in absolute units (e.g. 1pt) and font outlines are measured in relative ones (e.g. 1/1000 em). So what works as a 1pt trap on a 24pt font will reveal a 3pt trap at 72pt, and so on. And what's designed to allow an outline to choke an inline will produce the wrong effect if the colors are reversed.

This might be easier to explain with illustrations... At any rate, Andy, it's good to know people are thinking about this as much as we did! It was for all these reasons that we decided to produce the Shades series as perfectly mated components, which would allow designers to make the correct decisions about how things should trap. There's a brief look at the whole kit of parts, here:

http://www.typography.com/catalog/shades/features.html

A few years ago, we helped someone out who was making a pair of bichromatic fonts and was having trouble getting them to work. We finally solved all their problems except one: in the then current version of Quark Xpress (v3.0?) the two fonts simply would not line up on top of each other, even though they were designed to, had matching widths across the two fonts, and worked fine in every other app we tested. Incredibly frustrating, and in the end we had to give up. I still don't have any idea why it wouldn't work. Anyway, better luck to you, Jonathan. I particularly like that Cyclone Y.

Very nice font.

A few years ago I began a layers font with Michael Lynch
After a few years we are still in development.
The hardest part was tech issues but now is how to help designers to use it.
Here is a Tennis set preview

Great response Jonathan, thanks.

I can't wait to see these in use somewhere in print.

John Hudson: I'm slightly puzzled why that would be a big issue. Unless the client wanted to lay out whole blocks of text, couldn't you just do the bi-colored artwork in Illustrator or Photoshop, and then read it in as an EPS or JPG? Or was it the principle of the thing?

Jonathan H. (getting to be too many Jo(h)ns here!): Given that you created this face with the highlights separate, do you have any plans to bichromaticize(!) any of your existing products like Champion or Saracen?

Along with Jonathan's reasons for leaving trapping out of fonts, which I agree with, is that trapping really should happen further down the production line, as close to final output as possible. The reason, as Jonathan mentioned, is that trapping is size-sensitive, and last-minute changes in scale could easily ruin carefully-built traps.

Neat stuff! Actually these typefaces remind me of Hoefler's work for those other Johns — They Might Be Giants and the album art of Factory Showroom.

Oops, Jesse. You must have missed part of the article. Colin mentioned TMBG and linked to that very Amazon image.

Incidently, the other typeface on that album is one of my favorites: Steile Futura (AKA Bauer Topic) derived from the design by Paul Renner.

My bad.