Lexia was one of the first font families in our Exclusive font range. To allow for a broader range of application, we have now expanded the font family to Thin, Light, Regular, ExtraBold, Black, and their matching Italic styles. The middle range of weights remains ideally suited to body copy setting, while the thinner and heavier weights lend themselves well to be used in titling and on billboards.

Although slab serif fonts are often thought of as traditional, Lexia is a contemporary font family with open character shapes hinting at a humanist design structure. There are no superfluous design details; every curve, every line is carefully considered and contributes to an aesthetic and functional whole.

Dedica is a very different serif font from our Exclusive library, now available for the first time in the OpenType format. Dedica can broadly be classified as being in the Modern style, but unlike other fonts in this category it has a unique serif treatment. This dynamic font reads well at smaller sizes, and in a display environment the detailing of the design comes into its own. Compared to Lexia's even strokes, this font has a high contrast between thick and thin strokes. As with Lexia, Dedica implements the full Dalton Maag Standard character set, giving coverage for around fifty languages and many typographic features.

Both Lexia and Dedica are available to buy online for per-user licensing. Contact us for details of volume licensing, modification and OEM pricing.

The Vodafone font family, based on our extensive InterFace family, is already successfully used in many countries. The initial font family covered the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts, but today we can announce that Vodafone complements its typographic identity with Devanagari, used to set the Hindi language of Northern India.

Dalton Maag was approached to design a matching Devanagari to launch the Vodafone brand in India. Creating a unified design for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic is relatively easy as these three scripts are closely related. Devanagari, on the other hand, has very little in common with any of these three scripts. Accordingly, the challenge to make this script look and feel part of the Vodafone family was even greater. To ensure that we could meet the challenge, Dalton Maag worked closely with Fiona Ross, Tim Holloway and John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks. Fiona and Tim both have great experience designing scripts of South East Asia and were able to apply the unique design features of Dalton Maag's Vodafone family to the complexities of the Devanagari script. John provided the engineering skill and created a functioning OpenType font that works to full Microsoft specifications.

Although the character set consists of a limited number of consonant and vowel symbols, a font can still easily reach over 600 glyphs. The complexity of the system lies in the use of contextual conjunct forms, or ligatures. All of these have to be drawn separately and the font then has to be programmed with OpenType tables that are accessed by the operating system and applications to ensure the correct conjunct form is used in each context. We believe that Fiona, Tim, John and Dalton Maag have managed to create a truly matching font design that reflects the corporate identity of Vodafone across another culture.

Bruno Maag

Helvetica is omnipresent in design and corporate identity, to the point that it is almost impossible to convince design practitioners to contemplate an alternative. The reasons given are that Helvetica has just the right amount of neutrality, it comes in a large range of weights and styles, and it is universally available. I am not sure that I can accept these as arguments for using Helvetica almost exclusively. I have also come across users who say that they won't use anything but Helvetica because they have built themselves kern tables in Quark Xpress and they know how the font behaves. Unfortunately, this attitude closes the door on a rich and rewarding typographic experience.

When I look at Helvetica I am reminded of tepid water and stale bread. There is nothing more to it. In my opinion this is the poor man's Univers. Compared to the true Swiss typeface, Helvetica is crude. It is a peasant. And let’s face it, Helvetica, despite its name, is not Swiss. Although published by the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei near Basel, it was designed by Max Miedinger, a German designer. Adrian Frutiger is Swiss, and that makes Univers the Swiss font to use.

The spread of Helvetica has more to do with the fact that it was one of the core system fonts when the Apple Mac was first introduced in 1984. It quickly established itself as the designer's choice for all things. Today, the Macintosh is still the computer of choice, and like a virus, Helvetica will worm its way into more and more design work. I believe that we must take an active stand against this spread. Look at Univers and marvel at its perfection. Or be more adventurous and use one of the many far superior Grotesk alternatives available. It will only take a few minutes of your time viewing it in your browser or leafing through a specimen book.