A. M. Cassandre is best known for his posters, but he's also the designer of several typefaces including Peignot, the eccentric that's seen rabid abuse in the last quarter-century due to its broad availability as a digital font. Cassandre's first face was Bifur, designed in two parts — two colors for each glyph. Elsner & Flake once digitized Bifur as Cassandre Initials (now unavailable), but as a single font it didn't capture the two-tone spirit of the original.
Today, the International House of Fonts (IHOF) fills that void with the release of their own P22 Bifur. Rich Kegler's creation includes six fonts with layerable sets of wide lines, fine lines, and solid overlays. He took it a step further and added a lowercase that complements Cassandre's initials surprisingly well.
IHOF (supposedly the daughter of P22, but I'm having trouble distinguishing the two labels lately) also announced another multilayered revival: Durer Caps, again an alphabet that was previously only available via less serious renditions (Duerer Latin, Codex, Hands On Albrecht).
nice. must remember, 'bifur is not a screen font'.
love the two-tone thing, and the lc is great, very sympathethic.
geraint | Oct 1, 2004 01:32 AM
Ha! This is fantastic, I was just looking for Bifur a week or two ago. Thanks for the news.
Scott McMillin | Oct 1, 2004 04:32 PM
Thanks!
Bifur numbers. Now, would those be original?
The UC, figures and some punctuation are all from Cassandre's original.
The phrase "THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO USE BIFUR" is borrowed from the original Bifur specimen booklet.
The lc was a challenge and I understand why Cassandre didn't create one. If you want to have a look at the full character set, you can try it out (a little bit at a time) on the TypeCaster™. We may re-work the PDF specimen to show the lc to better effect.