Magazine

The roman weights of Minotaur include a hidden gem, unexpected in a typeface referencing cubism and early computer fonts — Lombardic capitals.

Originally created in 1967, the “Hershey Fonts” are among the earliest digital representations of type. Their creator, Dr. Allen Vincent Hershey, was not an ordinary typeface designer – he was employed as a theoretical physicist at the Naval Weapons Laboratory in Dahlgren, VA. Hershey’s usual work was mostly theoretical: he concerned himself with the analysis of submerged ships and their influence the waves flowing above, he calculated how liquids behave when they flow around objects, and analyzed ship hulls.

What I like about Levée’s style is his extreme professionalism, paired with a healthy portion of tongue-in-cheek humor. This may be the only explanation for the existence of a third style called “Beef”.

Applied to type, the term ‘monospaced’ commonly refers to typefaces whose characters – including capital and lowercase letters, punctuation marks, symbols, and white spaces – along with their sidebearings have each been conceived to fit within the same horizontal space. While the demand for such faces (also known as fixed-width, or non-proportional faces) has often stemmed from technical requirements, monospaced typefaces undeniably bear an aesthetic quality that has proved popular among diverse audiences through the ages.