Skip to content
Home / Fonts / Roy Cole / Colophon
ABCDEabcde12345$€@&

Colophon™

by Roy Cole
Individual Styles from $34.00 USD
40% Off
Complete family of 6 fonts: $136.00 USD
Colophon Font Family was designed by Roy Cole and published by Roy Cole. Colophon contains 6 styles and family package options.

More about this family
FREE 30-DAY TRIAL of Monotype Fonts to get over 150,000 fonts from more than 1,400 type foundries. Start free trial
Start free trial

About Colophon Font Family


During development of Colophon 30, the base font of the typeface family, two requirements emerged; namely that it should demonstrate good legibility and robustness when used for text composition, and where individual characters become more apparent, as in much larger sizes, these should appear well formed. Colophon 60 and 90 progressively increase in x-height to allow the counters to retain openness. The italics lean towards informality, this being apparent in the descender tails. On account of its neutrality there are few instances where the use of Colophon would be inappropriate; a quality that can also be attributed to Roy Cole's other typeface families: Lina, Zeta and Coleface.

Designers: Roy Cole

Publisher: Roy Cole

Foundry: Roy Cole

Design Owner: Roy Cole

MyFonts debut: May 14, 2009

Colophon™ is a trademark of Roy Cole Typography.

About Roy Cole

Roy Cole typography was formed in 2003 by the British typographer Roy Cole (1932–2012); a foundry dedicated to the development of sanserif typeface families that are characterized by their strong legibility, rhythmic elegance and timelessness. Cole was the only British compositor to study at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel (Basel School of Design) under the tutelage of Emil Ruder, the master of modern typography. In the 1950s–60s, the Gewerbeschule was host to a particularly formidable team of tutors – Robert Büchler, Kurt Hauert, Armin Hofmann, and Ruder himself – creating a typographic style that attained world recognition. This phenomenon, known as ‘Swiss Style’, became a hallmark of Cole’s practice, and continues to influence the work of many designers today. Following his studies at the Gewerbeschule, Cole worked for Birkhäuser AG, Basel, and Zollikofer & Co. AG, St Gallen, before gaining employment with a number of large design companies in the UK. In 1981 he established Cole Design Unit, designing hundreds of books and book covers for a range of prestigious publishers, museums and public libraries including Phaidon, Oxford University Press, Royal Academy of Arts, Ashmolean Museum, and the Bodleian Library. In 2003 he formed his own type foundry, Roy Cole typography, to develop sanserif typeface families that are notable for their strong legibility, making them particularly suitable for book design: Lina (2003), Zeta (2006), Colophon (2009), and Coleface (2012). Roy Cole maintained a life-long friendship with his contemporaries – in particular Bruno Pfäffli and Adrian Frutiger (Atelier Frutiger + Pfäffli in Paris, France) and Helmut Schmid (Helmut Schmid Design in Osaka, Japan) – involving many years of correspondence, collaboration and studio visits.

Read more

Read less