Salomé

Didones are back — were they ever really out? — and Salomé is at the front of the pack.

Full of a massive array of ligatures and stylistic alternates, small capitals with variant punctuation, and more superiors / inferiors / fractions / ordinals than you can dance for over dinner, Salomé is a unique, seductive serif family. Honestly, who makes a ‘gf’ ligature? You’ve never before written “dogface” with such style.

But Salomé isn’t your typical Didone. Sure, it has the usual high-contrast forms you’ll see in a Modern serif, but the variation between thicks and thins has been pushed to the extreme. It bucks the standard un­brack­et­ed serifs and instead goes for something much more elegant and gradual.

Another interesting thing about Salomé has nothing to do with its glyph set; it’s the way you can get it. The creators of the typeface, Spanish studio Atipo, are playing with perception of value. You can get Salomé Regular without spending a penny — just spread the word with a mention on Facebook or Twitter. To license the rest of the family, you can pick your price (with a €5 minimum). Is widespread awareness of the typeface and a low choose-your-own price worth just as much the cash they might get from a conventional pricing model? Only time will tell.

All that goodness for the price of a tweet? You’d lose your head.

Dan Mall is a designer and advisor from Philly. He’s the Founder of SuperFriendly, a design collaborative that uses Design to help organizations solve complicated problems involving people & devices. Dan is an enthralled husband & dad and co-founder of Typedia and The Businessology Show.