The terminals of rounded fonts are notoriously difficult to draw. This is particularly true for the terminals of curved strokes which often tend to 'flare out' giving the character a blobby appearance. We have spent a lot of time and paid a lot of attention to such details to ensure that Tondo shows none of these imperfections. We’ve created three basic styles – Light, Regular, Bold – for as broad usage as possible. The spacing of these designs is optimized for the 12 to 18 point range; smaller sizes tend to give rounded fonts an uneven feel. We’ve also included one weight intended for signage. This design is slightly condensed and more tightly spaced for usage in headlines and signs. If your project demands a lighter or bolder weight, we can of course create this for you.

Our Standard character set supports around fifty languages which use the Latin alphabet and includes some OpenType features. We’ve also included Cyrillic designs to cater for the Russian market which is still starved of high quality typography. We feel that with Tondo we have created a font family that applies contemporary design quality to Cyrillic also. The multilingual availability makes Tondo an ideal choice for multinational brands. And the exceptional design and crafting of each and every character makes Tondo the alternative to other fonts.

Tondo is available to buy online for per-user licensing for five or more users. Contact us for information on modification, volume licensing, and OEM licensing.

Designing for public spaces is always a challenge, and even more so if a whole city is to be gelled together by a coherent wayfinding system. Even before Bristol-based design agency City ID invited us to present our thoughts they had already spent a lot of time analysing the requirements, and of course the look and feel, of Southampton. A design concept crystallized that included a specifically designed font family, primarily for signage and wayfinding purposes.

In the weeks and months following, Dalton Maag worked closely with the team at City ID and Southampton City Council. We presented initial concept ideas that in turn helped to condense the many thoughts and ideas about the entire design project. Eventually, everyone in the team agreed that a contemporary Sans Serif design would be most appropriate, a design that supported the fresh look and feel of all the graphic work. For that purpose we designed a single display version, never to be used smaller than 24 point and three weights of text fonts. The design of the text fonts follows the modern principles of the display version.

A high degree of public accountability and compliance with accessibility guidelines as defined by the Disability Discrimination Act is paramount when designing for the public sector. With this in mind we created a signage font that is highly recognizable and attractive, but is still legible. The text fonts show a clear family resemblance but were designed with pure functionality in mind. As Southampton is a port city that welcomes people from all over the world we engineered the fonts to contain the Dalton Maag Standard character set. To ensure our work complies with DDA recommendations for legibility the font designs underwent an independent audit by the University of Reading’s Typography Department.

The first stage of the design work is completed and a wayfinding map has been produced. Soon the fonts will be applied to road signs, bus shelters and other collateral. We plan to present a more extensive case study on this exciting project once more material is available.

More and more fonts are being made available in OpenType format. While some offer no more than the venerable Postscript Type 1, increasingly font foundries are using the power and flexibility of OpenType to add value to their fonts. But while OpenType, as a superset of TrueType and Postscript Type 1, offers unprecedented backwards and forwards compatibility, application support beyond basic character rendering is still lacking.

Increased character set coverage is becoming the norm for new fonts, and many also include advanced typographic features. Reputable font designers and engineers take great care to ensure that all of these extra features are built to the specifications published by Microsoft and Adobe. At Dalton Maag we too have been busy producing OpenType fonts that include typographic features appropriate and sympathetic to each font design.

In order to give our customers and clients a clear overview we have applied named character set and OpenType feature standards to all of our fonts. Unfortunately, within the font industry there are no fixed standards for the labelling the extent of character sets and features, but as font developers we are safe in the knowledge that good quality fonts are years ahead of the applications when it comes to supporting OpenType’s features.

The only mainstream design applications with comprehensive support for OpenType typographic features are Adobe CS (Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop) and QuarkXPress 7. Other applications, even those that are Unicode enabled, often have no simple access to these extra characters. It is a great shame that Microsoft, itself a great promoter of OpenType, hasn’t taken the opportunity to deliver the latest Office release with full typographic feature support. This is even more surprising as Office for Indic and Arabic markets has had OpenType layout support for a number of years to enable high quality typography and script support.

We have stopped producing and supporting traditional PostScript Type 1 fonts. Unfortunately, clients who still use QuarkXPress 6 and 6.5 will find that OpenType fonts do not work reliably. For example, kern pairs are not always recognized, and we have found during compatibility testing that incorrect characters sometimes display and print. We have also seen problems when documents created in QuarkXPress 6 are opened in QuarkXPress 7, with new OpenType fonts. Documents created in QuarkXPress 7 work consistently well.

As fewer and fewer fonts are available in the legacy formats, font users need to consider upgrading their programs to versions that fully support and exploit OpenType. While at first it may appear a more expensive way to acquire fonts, OpenType provides a single font file which often replaces several fonts in legacy formats, integrating small caps, symbols and expert sets into one consistent, convenient package, improving functionality, simplifying workflow and delivering cost savings.