Some history for LTR Salmiak

LTR Salmiak is a hand lettered typeface. Several faces preceded Salmiak that are also hand made, but were never published. A brief history of my hand lettered typefaces.
In 1990, at the height of the grab and scan typeface revolution I sketched a broad-nibbed typeface in pencil. I was working at the Font Bureau at that time. The font was called Oreon. At the time I wasn't too precise about recording important parameters during design and production. So most of the originals are gone, as well as scans etc. Since then I've tried to add an italic and caps, but I could never match the same roughness on the outlines, the level of detail and text color.

More drawings

After Oreon came Kosmik, a hand drawn sans which was built on Oreon's ideas. Kosmik is constructed around a complicated theory to make type more lively by switching around alternatives. Years passed. I become more interested in steel-nibbed pen (expansion) contrast types, as a result Federal and Zapata were drawn in roughly the same period. Then for the Typoman and Crocodile animation system I needed some funky type for titles. This became the Typeface collection, with a couple of stylistic variations, inline and outline for coloring effects. Really strange small caps pretending to be caps. Because the fonts were moving all the time no one really noticed that there wasn't any kerning.

Market demands

Until my mom started using the fonts for some of her design work and I decided it was time to draw another one. It isn't that much work. All the hand lettering for the shop design was beginning to become repetitive as well. This became Squire, the name is chosen because I wanted to show the funky Q in the name.

Squire was alright, but a bit too loose. It needed a tuck here and there. It needed a lot of kerning. It needed an italic. Within a week Squire grew from a wobbly hand lettered sketch to Salmiak. Still wobbly, but better suited for smaller sizes. Regular enough to make it useful, but quirky enough to differentiate it with the tons of other Bodoniods. Salmiak is by no means finished. A new version in OpenType format is coming up.