TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Fri Dec 13 00:48:53 EST 2024

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ABOUT

DJR Type [David Jonathan Ross]

DJR Type (Conway, MA, and before that, Deerfield, MA, and before that Los Angeles, CA, and before that, Lowell, MA) stands for David Jonathan Ross Type. Originally from Los Angeles, he was a student at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, where he studied information design and typographic tradition. In 2007, he joined Font Bureau as a junior designer and was assisting with custom projects and expanding Font Bureau's retail library. Soon after that, het set up DJR Type. In 2016, DJR Type joined Type Network and pulled all his typefaces from MyFonts. He also runs Font of the Month Club.

In 2018, he was the tenth winner of the Charles Peignot Prize. His typefaces:

• Manicotti (2010). An ultra reversed-stress Western saloon style typeface that won an award at Modern Cyrillic 2014. DJR Manicotti won an award at TDC2 2007. For a free lookalike, see Plagiacotti (2009, Saberrider).
• Lavinia.
• Climax Text (2006) is a text and display series that was designed for Hampshire's student newspaper.
• Trilby (2009, Font Bureau). Trilby is based on a 19th century French Clarendon of wood type fame.
• Condor (2010, Font Bureau). This is a 60-style art deco family. By 2020, it had a 3-axis (weight, width, italic) variable version.
• Turnip (2012) is an angular and manly text face, also published at Font Bureau.
• In 2013, Ross and Roger Blcak revived Nebiolo's Forma for the redesign of Hong Kong Tatler, a fashion mag, supervised and commissioned by Roger Black, who was then based in Hong Kong. Read about the whole process in this piece by Indra Kupferschmid. Page specially dedicated to DJR Forma. In 2021, Belgian national broadcaster VRT picked DJR Forma for all its entire range of media.
• Bungee (2013, Google Fonts) won an award at TDC 2014. This homeless typeface, which comes in Regular, Hairline, Inline, Outline and Shade versions, is free: Bungee is a font family that celebrates urban signage. It wrangles the Latin alphabet to work vertically as well as horizontally.
• In 2014, David Jonathan Ross created the formidable 168-style programming font family Input (Font Bureau). Input is free for private use. It won an award at Modern Cyrillic 2014 and in the TDC 2015 Type Design competition. See also the proportionally spaced typewriter family Input Sans.
• Gimlet (2016). A 112-style Opentype family loosely based on Georg Trump's 1938 typeface, Schadow, and advertized as funky and functional. Ross writes: Gimlet is half Schadow, half imagination, and nothing else. And like its namesake beverage, Gimlet is a little tart, a little sweet, and can really pack a punch. Gimlet Variable Bold Condensed followed in 2019. Gimlet XRay (2020) is an An experimental colorized version of Gimlet that exposes what goes on under the hood of a variable font, visualizing control points, bounding boxes, kerning, etc. Amazingly, this variable color font has six axes, weight, width, oncurve point size, offcurve point size, glyph utline weight and point outline weight.
• Fern and Fern Micro (2014, Font Bureau). A Venetian typeface designed for screen.
• Output Sans.
• Fit (2017, by David Jonathan Ross and Maria Doreuli). A tall black display family that runs from ultra-compressed to very wide. It screams Use me for the Oscars! Fit was first developed as a variable font. It won an award at Granshan 2017.
• DJR Lab, or Lab Variable (2017), is a free pixelish variable font.
• Under miscellaneous, we find an untitled French Clarendon and an untitled semi-serif.
• Font of the Month Club fonts from 2017: Nickel, Roslindale (Roslindale is a text and display serif that takes its inspiration from De Vinne, a Victorian oldstyle typeface named for the nineteenth century printer and attributed to Gustav Schroeder and Nicholas Werner of the Central Type Foundry), Zenith (blackboard bold), Crayonette (a revival of Henry Brehmer's scriptish Crayonette, 1890), Bild (a compressed headline font based on the American gothic type styles from the 20th century; a variable font followed in 2019), Pappardelle Party (spaghetti Western style), Roslindale Text, Klooster (followed in 2021 by Klooster Thin).
• Font of the Month Club fonts from 2018: Bradley DJR (a revival of the blackletter typeface Bradley, 1895, William H. Bradley), Extraordinaire, Rhody (slab serif), Map Roman (an all caps vintage mapmaker font), Output Sans Hairlines, Rumpus Extended, Roslindale Light, Merit Badge (a variable color font).
• A tech type virtuoso, he charmed me with his art deco variable font Extraordinaire (2018) that was influenced by the diamond-shaped forms found in the center of the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
• Typefaces from 2019: Heckendon Hairline, a condensed Clarendon.
• Typefaces from 2020: Dattilo (a variable style revival of Aldo Novarese's slab serif Dattilo (1974)), Pomfret.
• Typefaces from 2021: Rustique (rustic capitals), Megazoid (a chunky geometric sans), Job Clarendon (with Bethany Heck, who wrote: Job Clarendon is an homage to job printing---display-heavy designs made for posters and flyers in the heyday of letterpress printing. This style of Clarendons was wildly popular in this genre of work, and I've always been interested in how adaptable they were. The style was fattened, squished and stretched to accommodate lines of text both short and long and type foundries across the globe each found their own unique features to contribute to the Clarendon stew. Ross pulled the design to both extremes but had his work cut out as he explained: The chasm between Hairline and Black was far too wide to interpolate across effectively, so I incorporated new drawings in the Extra Light, Regular, and Bold weights to act as additional tentposts to support the design).

Speaker at ATypI 2016 in Warsaw and at ATypI 2017 in Montreal. Klingspor link. Home page. Adobe link.

EXTERNAL LINKS
DJR Type
 [Buy fonts]
 [Designer info]
Monotype link
Behance page
Klingspor Museum page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Commercial fonts (small outfits) ⦿ Western fonts ⦿ Type scene in California ⦿ Wood Type ⦿ Type scene in Massachusetts ⦿ Art deco typefaces ⦿ Fashion mag typefaces ⦿ Clarendon ⦿ Monospaced fonts ⦿ Fonts for programming ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ Venetian or antiqua typefaces ⦿ Very thin (hairline sans) typefaces ⦿ Variable fonts ⦿ Multicolor typefaces ⦿ Blackletter fonts ⦿