Ashbourne 1241

New Renaissance: The reclaiming of one baby that got thrown out with the bath water in today’s technological revolution – the good aspects of yesterday’s ways of doing things, how things that work well can also be beautiful and feel good, how a rich variety of different skills can illuminate one another, how the arts can achieve amazing effects on the way people behave, how musical and artistic harmony can be a model for human harmony... David Kettlewell is a harper, renaissance musicologist and conductor to illuminate his work with text and type. As his early inspirations, he quotes poring over facsimiles of Books of Hours, singing from renaissance music manuscripts, and an old and dog-eared Letraset catalogue that was his constant companion. “We're anyway surrounded by an awful lot of stuff we've written, and it doesn't take much more time to make sure that it's something you feel good looking at, and it makes the quality of life so much greater.” David’s work with digital type started with the enchanted discovery of the programme Fontographer hidden away inside the Freehand Graphic Studio, and has lately been delighted to progress to the empowering world surrounding its successor, FontLab Studio. Richard Bradley, already an established name in the world of fonts (Bradley Hand, Calligraphic Ornaments, Fine Hand, Bible Script in the Linotype, ITC and Letraset catalogues), encouraged David to publish his own work and to develop digitally Rick’s new paper designs; and so New Renaissance Fonts was formed. The emphasis is on original calligraphic and decorative fonts, firmly rooted in the Renaissance tradition of hand-measured beauty and human balance, but completely up to date for today’s needs. The initial designs are by Rick, David and others in his circle, while the creation of the digital fonts is done by David. The New Renaissance Fonts web-site gives examples of these fonts in use, as well as offering two dozen other fonts for free download as long as they’re still not quite ready for commercial release: as a complement to it, the Fontografia web-site provides stories and hints about ways of using fonts, ways of making fonts, ways of enjoying fonts.

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