Tephra is the result of collaboration with Hamish Muir. The font was originally created by 8vo in 1994, for interact, a special issue of the American Center for Design Journal. It was later used for the 1997 Flux New Music Festival poster series.

Hamish approached us just over a year ago to expand the existing single style into a number of outline weights. Combining these weights in different ways transforms plain typography into art without losing the primary function; at its core Tephra still is a legible display font. Whilst a simple layering of the fonts is the most obvious design option the different styles allow for the creation of rich patterns formed from words.

The font family has now been expanded to Dalton Maag's Standard character set. Tephra will retail for £60 for a five-user licence for a single weight, with all six weights for £315. But for one day only, on its launch day today, 15 January 2008, you can purchase the fonts with a 30% discount. That's £220.50 for the full family for up to five users. To take advantage of this launch day discount add this discount code to your account now.

ThyssenKrupp commissioned us to design a serif font family to accompany our sans serif design, which they have been successfully using for a number of years. Originally, the sans serif was part of a corporate identity, designed by Interbrand in Germany, when the two engineering giants Thyssen and Krupp joined forces. The Serif design expands on this successful identity allowing more flexibility and differentiation in typographic applications.

At present, only three Roman weights are available – Regular, Medium and Bold – which match the sans serif weights to create an even texture. The fonts were designed primarily for text usage with the structure of the characters closely resembling those of the sans serif, being slightly condensed and having a square appearance. As with the sans serif, it was important that the design is clean and functional.

Although the sans serif has always been in OpenType format, including typographic features, we have taken the decision to furnish both font families with a Dalton Maag Typo character set. Besides support for around fifty languages these fonts also provide enhanced typographic functionality.

Traditionally text fonts have always had the digit 1 with plenty of letter spacing to the left and right. This always makes it a chore to set numbers in text as the 1 has to be kerned manually and individually. Of course, the reason is that the digits 0 to 9 are spaced on tabular widths. Tabular spacing allows the user to set tables where it is important that all numbers line up correctly when placed vertically. Annual reports, for example, demand tabular spacing. It is also often the case that both Regular and Bold styles have the same widths for the numbers, for the same reason. Display fonts, however, don’t need to be set in tables and therefore are spaced proportionally. Using OpenType font features this problem can be alleviated. Dalton Maag’s Exclusive OpenType fonts all come with both tabular and proportionally spaced numbers, accessible by applying the appropriate OpenType typographic feature in your application.

We also often hear that documents lose their font formatting when documents travel from Macintosh to the Windows platform. This is particularly true for Office documents which contain Italic or Bold fonts. On the Macintosh, users tend to access fonts, including weights and styles, via the font menu. In many instances the documents will not display correctly when they are opened on Windows. The reason is that on Windows fonts styles are traditionally accessed using the style button, due to the way Windows groups fonts. In order to create cross-platform compatible documents fonts have to be engineered in the same way for both platforms, and be accessed in the same way on both platforms. The lack of cross-platform support generally affects the old Type 1 PostScript format the most with OpenType fonts generally being engineered in a way which ensures no loss of formatting. At Dalton Maag we have created our font families in a way that only Italics need to be accessed via the style button, where applicable, and font weights are chosen from the font menu whatever the platform.

If you are unsure if your fonts support cross-platform document formatting ask your font supplier. Of course, you can also use Dalton Maag's font modification service to re-engineer your fonts to work the way you want them to.