Tiro TypeWorks

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Tiro TypeWorks [John Hudson] John Hudson and Wm. Ross Mills, the co-founders of Tiro Typeworks in 1994, design wonderful top-of-the-line fonts in Vancouver. Their commercial typefaces can be bought from I Love Typography since 2020. From the Tiro web page: Tiro Typeworks is an independent digital type foundry developing&marketing high quality typeface families for PC and Mac platforms. Our commitment is to continuing the independent tradition of typography, as it has existed for more than five hundred years, free from the influence of fashion and novelty. Tiro is increasingly involved in font technologies, and are avid advertisers for OpenType and work often with Microsoft and Linotype on projects. John has created or collaborated on typefaces for Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Ethiopic, Greek, Gurmukhi, Hebrew, IPA, Javanese, Kannada, Latin, Odia, Sinhalese, Soyombo, Telugu, Thai, and other writing systems. He is an expert contributor to Unicode, and a member of the W3C Web Fonts Working Group. Interview in 2008 by Hiba Studio. Tiro's typefaces: Academia (1997, by Mills). The titling and display typeface Aeneas based on classical Roman capitals. This incomplete typeface was created by John Hudson based on glyphs drawn by an Austrian designer. 1530 Garamond (one of the most beautiful and faithful revivals of Claude's creations), by Mills. Manticore (John Hudson's own absolutely magnificent brainchild). Plantagenet (by Mills). Sylfaen was designed for Microsoft in 1998 by John Hudson and Wm. Ross Mills of Tiro Typeworks, and Geraldine Wade of Monotype Typography. Sylfaen is a Welsh word meaning "foundation"; an apt name since the font stemmed from research into the typographic requirements of many different scripts and languages. Sylfaen supports the WGL4.0 character set, for Pan-European language coverage. In addition to Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letterforms, the font contains the characters necessary for support of the Armenian and Georgian languages. [Download site, see also here]. Hudson also does corporate identity work, such as HeidelbergGothicOsF (done for Heidelberger based on NewsGothic). Other clients included Microsoft, IBM and Apple. In 2001, Mills developed Pigiarniq (Download site), a multiscript typeface for native American languages. This project was commissioned by the government of Nunavut, a new Canadian territory. Note: please visit the page on James Evans' type cutting methods: it was this missionary who developed the Cree writing system which was later adapted for use with Inuktitut. Winner with Mamoun Sakkal and Paul Nelson at the TDC2 2003 competition for Arabictype. In 2003, he is publishing unicode-compliant fonts called SBL Greek, SBL Hebrew and SBL Latin, at the Society for Biblical Literature. In 2004, winner of an award at TDC2 2004 with Nyala, an Ethiopic text face, which has a nice Latin component as well. Hudson and Mills have, to date, designed and built fonts for the Arabic, Cherokee, Cyrillic, Ethiopic, Greek, Hebrew, Inuktitut (Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics), extended Latin, and Ogham scripts. These include, for example, Adobe Hebrew (2000-2008). Constantia (2004, a beautiful OpenType family made for Microsoft's ClearType project). Helvetica Linotype (2004), for which he received a TypeArt '05 award for the Cyrillic component. Vodafone Hindi (2007, with Tim Holloway and Fiona Ross) won an award at TDC2 2008. Gabriola (2008) is a script font by Hudson done for Microsoft---it is included in some Windows packages---see, e.g., here. It has many swashes and special ligatures, but it is not connected. Athena Ruby (2012), a winner at the TDC 2013 competition. Client: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection, Washington DC. Brill (2011, John Hudson, Alice Savoie, Paul Hanslow and Karsten Luecke) and Brill Greek (2021), Brill Cyrillic (2021) and Brill Latin (2021), all by the same foursome. This classic text typeface family was a winner at the TDC 2013 competition. Client: Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Slabo 27px and Slabo 13px (2013) are free Google Web Fonts. Optimized to be used at 27px and 13px, respectively, these fonts were created for use in online advertising. Codesigner with Eben Sorkin, Joshua Darden, Maxim Zhukov, and Viktoriya Grabowska, of Omnes Cyrillic. In 2018, Paul Hanslow, Ross Mills and John Hudson co-designed the free STIX Two family, which is based on Times Roman. Castoro (2020). Hudson writes: Castoro is a libre font family released under the SIL Open Font License. Castoro is a specific instance of an adaptive design developed for Tiro Typeworks' internal use as a base from which to generate tailored Latin companions for some of our non-European script types. The instance that has been expanded to create the Castoro fonts was initially made for the Indic fonts that we produced for Harvard University Press. In the Castoro version, we have retained the extensive diacritic set for transliteration of South Asian languages, and added additional characters for an increased number of European languages. The parent design here presented as the Castoro instance began as a synthesis of aspects of assorted Dutch types from the 16th through 18th Centuries. Castoro roman was designed by John Hudson, and the italic with his Tiro colleague Paul Hanslow, assisted by Kaja Slojewska. It is named Castoro after the busy beaver, a real workhorse in the Canadian forests. Google Fonts link. Followed in December 2020 by John Hudson's roman capitalis monumentalis typeface Castoro Titling. Clairvo (2021): Clairvo is a proof-of-concept font that uses OpenType Layout to implement the number system developed by Cistercian monks in the 13th Century. The number system records each number from 1 to 9999 as a unique sign based on encoding units, tens, hundreds, and thousands in quadrants: top-right, top-left, bottom-right, and bottom-left respectively. The Clairvo font uses OpenType glyph substitution to handle mirroring of the shapes in each quadrant, but relies mostly on contextual GPOS anchors to shift the glyphs around the quadrants. This means that all 9999 numbers can be represented my a minimal number of glyphs. Skeena (2021). A humanist sans typeface by John Hudson and Paul Hanslow developed for Microsoft for use as one of the default fonts in Office apps and Microsoft 365 products. Klingspor link.	EXTERNAL LINKS Tiro TypeWorks Monotype link Klingspor Museum page MyFonts search Monotype search Fontspring search Google search INTERNAL LINKS Commercial fonts (small outfits) ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ The Canadian type scene ⦿ Native-American fonts ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ African fonts ⦿ Indic language fonts ⦿ Hebrew font links ⦿ Garalde or Garamond typefaces ⦿ Baskerville ⦿ Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ Typefaces inspired by the Trajan column in Rome ⦿