Font makeover

Here at design4church we're often pushing the importance of font consistency in your church publications. Finding a consistent and coherent set of fonts with nicely contrasting weights and sticking with them relentlessly is the challenge. Every few years, though, it's time for a total refresh. At mpc, we've moved from the Eras font family (with lots of useful weights from ultra light to ultra black) to a slimmer Bell Gothic phase, which we're now - after about 5 years - retiring in favour of a new font family based on Bitstream's Humanist 777 Condensed. I was looking for something slim, sans-serif, modern and clean. Apart from the unlikely name, the only problem with the Humanist777 family was that it looked a bit 'sterile' on the page. Clean, but too clinical. So with the help of the excellent Type2.2 font editor (and its freeware partner TypeLight), I set about making some mods. Putting it simply, I slightly bent the stems on abdgmnpqr and u. The results? A little bit of swing, and a subtle warmth on the page. Here's a sample...



After working the same minor surgery on the light and extrablack fonts and renaming them to a more corporate-friendly MPC Black and MPC Light, it was time to start work on a matching serif font. Painstaking - but no worse than knitting. All my TV watching time in the past week or two has been spent adding carefully styled serifs, and the result is a very tidy body text that fits perfectly with the sans serif fonts... MPC Serif.

Finally, our favourite handscript face - Desert Dog - got a makeover to raise the x-height to match the rest of the MPC font family as MPC Hand. Here's the final result...