Foco - a new font by Dalton Maag

In Spring 2002 Bruno Maag gave a type design workshop in São Paulo, Brazil. During this workshop the initial concept ideas for Foco were created by Fabio Haag, a young designer from Sapiranga, Southern Brazil. Fabio then continued to work on the typeface, expanding it to a more complete character set. All the while he sent his work to Bruno for comments. Two years ago Dalton Maag decided that Foco would make a nice addition to its already eclectic font library. The design team at Dalton Maag took the digital drawings by Fabio and reworked them to ensure that the typeface is to the same high quality standards as all Dalton Maag Exclusive fonts. The result is a four weight font family with open and round character shapes that feel warm and inviting.

The high degree of design refinement and attention paid to the spacing make this typeface very legible. We think that Foco is particularly well suited for use in publishing and advertising environments, ranging from billboard applications to leaders into a magazine article.

As with all new and updated Dalton Maag Exclusive fonts, Foco features our new extended character set and is available in TTF-based OpenType format only. Users of Quark 6 and 6.5 may experience unexpected behaviour with TTF-based OpenType fonts due to the lack of OpenType feature and Unicode support. However, Quark 7 appears to have addressed all of these issues.

To celebrate the launch of Foco, we're offering a 15% discount on all our Dalton Maag Exclusive fonts until the end of August 2006, exclusively to our Infoletter email subscribers.

BT calls upon Dalton Maag for new fonts

In 1999 Dalton Maag designed the Sans Serif typefaces for British Telecommunications plc (BT) which replaced the Italic Serif that had been used in all communications. In May this year, BT announced a refreshed identity which will be applied to all communications in due course. London design agency Venture 3 designed the new identity style, starting with consumer articles. Dalton Maag was invited, on the strength of all previous work with BT, to design a typeface that captured the spirit of the refreshed identity. The new typeface is a further evolution, opting for a clean and contemporary look and feel.

During the design process we worked closely with Stuart Jane of Venture 3, and David Mercer and Jenny Quillinan of BT. Jenny Quillinan says: "We had already worked with Dalton Maag on the design of the previous BT font so had first-hand knowledge of their skills in typography. They understood our brief to take an existing font created for BT some years ago and redesign it for a number of environments such as print, online and TV, without losing the overall look of the original. The final result is exactly what we wanted - a new, modern font for one of the leaders in global communications."

Dalton Maag is excited to work again with BT - an organization which understands the value of a corporate typeface. Not only does it have emotional and brand value, but the fonts Dalton Maag designed for BT's telephone directory enabled the client to save on average 10 lines per page over approx 25 Million phone books printed per annum.

Exciting times at Dalton Maag

2006 is a big year for us. We have been in business for 15 years doing nothing but type. We started up as a one-man show and now boast eight members of staff in offices in London, Zurich and Boulder, Colorado. To celebrate this, we decided to create a beautiful exhibition about our work. The exhibition is built on six tables each covering a particular subject: emotion, design, screen, language, inspiration and Dalton Maag work. Most of the tables have an audio commentary where Bruno Maag explains how well-designed type and properly engineered fonts add value to brand and design projects. We intend to travel the exhibition and hope to publish an itinerary soon. We are of course open to invitations to host the exhibition - simply contact either Bruno Maag or Angela Gilroy.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue. It is designed to be a workaday tool for the graphic designer who wants to convince their clients that type is important. We have divided the catalogue into five subjects: Emotion, Design, Screen, Language/OpenType and Sustainability. Each is illustrated with a case study and the back pages show the type we have designed for some of the world’s best known brands. The catalogue is available for sale on our website and retails at £9.99 plus P&P.

Earlier this year we published Co Headline and Co Text. This has sparked the most beautiful specimen book. The Co font family was the first for which we applied our new production standards that include an extended character set. Each character is shown, with its matching glyph name, to show this typeface family in the best possible light. Customers who already have bought one or more of the fonts in the Co family will receive the book free or charge in due course. For those who simply like books, the Co Book is available for purchase from our website for £4.99 plus P&P. Who knows, holding the book in your hands may entice you to buy the font. You will still get your free copy to give to a loved one, or simply to keep it all to yourself, unopened. Just in the knowledge that you have it. Note however, that availability of the Co Book is limited and we will not reprint.