The German designer Renate Weise created the fonts (1999) and (2003).
Linotype Charon is part of the Take Type Library, chosen from the entries of the 1999 International Digital Type Design Contest for inclusion on the TakeType 3.1 CD.
Renate Weise studied fine arts in Mainz and works today as a freelance artist. Weise sees Charon as “a typeface with two sides to it. Charon is objective and classic, but not neutral, not an everyday typeface. Charon is modern and its animated, curving letters seek to touch the reader. The font is the moderator, which brings content to the reader, but should in itself make the reader curious.” Charon is also named after such a moderator. Charon is the name of the ferryman of Greek mythology who brought the souls of the dead across the River Acheron into the Underworld, the one being who connected the worlds of the living and the dead. Linotype Charon, with its light swing and script character, can be used for both short texts or headlines.
The Scriptuale family, which contains eight typefaces, is a contemporary upright calligraphic face. This family of typefaces speaks to the present, while at the same time reflecting on a lyrical past. The letterforms of the Scriptuale family are romanticized, they reference German calligraphic styles from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. For instance the design of Scriptuale’s uppercase strays from the canon of classical proportion into romantic idealism. While the C and O are drawn according to the ancient quadratic proportions - almost twice as wide, optically, as the E or the L - the letter A is wider than would be expected, and the D narrower. These subtle differences introduce a different rhythm into text set in Scriptuale than Italic styles of calligraphy may offer.
Scriptuale’s Gs merit special notice: both the upper and lower case G lunge slightly forward, further enhancing the dynamic quality of the text. Also unique in Scriptuale’s design is the lowercase width: the letterforms appear slightly condensed; they have large x-heights to compensate for this. In a delightful twist, the number 2’s beak has been closed by drawing it full-circle, back into the stem: this references a style of letter design that was practiced, among other places, by artists from the old Klingspor foundry in Offenbach Germany. Typefaces constructed there easily captured the zeitgeist of the romantic period, but are less calligraphic than Scriptuale (e.g., Rudolf Koch’s Koch Antiqua).
Linotype Charon and Linotype Scriptuale are trademarks of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG, which may be registered in certain jurisdictions, exclusively licensed through Linotype GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG.
The German designer Renate Weise created the fonts (1999) and (2003).
