Beorcana by Carl Crossgrove

Beorcana
Designed by Carl Crossgrove
Published by Terrestrial Design
Available from Fonts.com
Winner

TDC2 2007

Typefaces of 2007 index »

Last year, after 14 years of work, Carl Crossgrove finally released his magnum opus. A time well-spent, that’s for sure. Beorcana has what it takes to become a classic.

The typeface has no serifs, yet it’s the opposite of a grotesque. It exhibits the rhythmic contrast and the humanist proportions of a renaissance roman.

Its letters please with vividly dancing forms in every detail. However, this obvious calligraphic derivation never seems inappropriately fancy — even the spruce swash italics are down-to-earth in a convenient way. The Thin isn’t anemic and the Ultra isn’t heavy-handed – Crossgrove really knows his stuff. Beorcana looks refreshing – and at the same time so self-evident and familiar as it had always been around.

While these days Zapf’s Optima (the somewhat moldy godfather of this genre) can be seen almost merely in drugstores and on cosmetics packaging, Beorcana’s field of application is a lot wider, featuring seven weights for display sizes, five for text use, and another two for tiny captioning (each of them accompanied by their corresponding italics). The Beorcana clan provides a versatile system, and particularly meets the demands of a book workhorse.

Those who claim that longer reading text can’t do without serifs haven’t discovered Beorcana yet. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of it, both as a designer and a reader, and can hardly imagine an overuse. Beorcana is here to stay!

— Florian Hardwig is a designer and frequent typeface identifier at the Typophile forum. He recently presented at ATypI Brighton on “international school scripts and the ‘dialects’ of handwriting”.

Posted by Typographica | March 04, 2008 | LINK

Comments

"While these days Zapf's Optima (the somewhat moldy godfather of this genre) can be seen almost merely in drugstores and on cosmetics packaging..."

The above characterization of Optima is unfair, unflattering, and uninformed.

1. Hermann regards Optima as his favorite "daughter." (This indicates not only a gender, but a relative age.)

2. Moldy? If anything, Optima has remained the embodiment of cleanliness and sterility. Cosmetics ads and packaging are not known for moldiness. Quite the opposite.

3. Beorcana follows a lineage not exclusively associated with Zapf/Optima, per se, but with 20th-century letterers who "got" what Rudolf Koch was teaching. Berthold Wolpe (Albertus), and Warren Chappell (Lydian, Trajanus) were both pupils of Koch. Bob Middleton's typeface, Stellar, is yet another example of a design that pays homage to the leanings of Koch. Beorcana shows that Carl has been tuned in to sources which have not been mentioned, and perhaps not even understood, by Florian Hardwig.

John Downer | Mar 9, 2008 12:06 PM