Austin Hairline Condensed Family

Condensed width of Austin Hairline Roman, drawn by Maria Doreuli for Kuchar Swara for the Daily Telegraph's magazines.

Azzurri Regular Style

Designed by Paul Barnes, along with Gabriello, for Puma. Azzurri is a low-contrast italic with faceted edges and no curves, designed to look both legible and stylish on the backs of football shirts. The swashes were a later addition.

Caponi Condensed Family

Christian Schwartz and Paul Barnes drew this around when finishing Caponi for Entertainment Weekly. Our memory is hazy but this seems to have been sketched for their covers. They ended up sticking with a condensed sans instead, maybe because the Marlboro Man vibe was too strong.

Caslon Dot Regular Style

Very light dotted caps, loosely related to Caslon Doric.

Caslon Ionic Rounded Family

Bolder and more robust than the modern, yet lighter and more refined than the Egyptian, the Ionic with its bracketed serif was another innovation of the nineteenth century. Lesser known than Thorowgood’s Clarendon, Caslon’s Ionic No. 2 is a superb example of the form and greatly influenced the newspaper fonts of the next century. Greg Gazdowicz created the Rounded variant of Caslon Ionic in 2025.

Gabriello Family

Football numbers are an exercise in balancing style with functionality. Inspired by brush lettering, Puma commissioned the Bold weight of Gabriello for the shirts of their sponsored teams in the 2010 Africa Cup of Nations, and also used it for their African teams in that year’s World Cup: Algeria, Cameroon, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire. Far more organic than the typical straight-sided octic athletic letters, Gabriello is slanted on two axes, both horizontally and vertically, giving the energy of a script without causing production problems for the shirts.

Guardian Agate Sans Grades Family

Compensating for the worst possible printing conditions, Guardian Agate Sans is designed for maximum legibility at 6 point and below on newsprint.

What are Grades?

The family features four subtly different weights, or “grades”, allowing users to find the perfect weight for a particular situation, from 1, the lightest, to 4, the heaviest. The Medium weight can be used for reversing out of a dark background, subheads, and other cases where an additional level of typographic hierarchy is needed.

What is Duplexing?

Guardian Agate Sans features two kinds of bolds. The standard Bolds are wider than the Regulars, as requested by The Guardian to make sport scores a bit more readable at 4.5pt. The Duplex Bolds set at exactly the same widths as the Regulars, useful for things like classified ads and stock listings where line length is at a premium. All numerals are tabular across all styles, so they can be freely mixed in tables of figures no matter which version is used.

Guardian Compact Family

Guardian Compact has shorter, simpler serifs and narrower, stiffer proportions than Guardian Egyptian Headine. People always seemed to like this compact, flat-sided variant of Guardian Egyptian, but we never got around to drawing italics and finishing it.

Orlando Family

Designed in 2021 by Paul Barnes for the In’Ei art gallery in Florence, Orlando adapts the lightest weight of Orleans and its italic with flared strokes, for a more overtly calligraphic appearance.

Punch Family

Punch is a revisiting of Miller & Richard’s News Bill series, a display face made in the 1880s. Paul Barnes added a roman to the italic for Fraser Muggeridge studio’s exhibition and publication design for ‘Yayoi Kusama: You, Me and the Balloons’ at Factory International, Manchester.

Sanomat Banner Family

High contrast version of Sanomat, drawn by Greg Gazdowicz for Sami Valtere at Helsingin Sanomat.

Sanomat Slab Family

Slab version of Sanomat, drawn for Sami Valtere at Helsingin Sanomat.

Williamson Italic Style

Williamson Italic is a distinctive display typeface originally crafted for a series of Franz Kafka book covers that never happened. Created by Paul Barnes, it draws inspiration from his own lettering, blending influences from Eastern European design, Berthold Wolpe’s lesser-known Hyperion, and the stone-carving traditions of western Scotland. Its condensed form, with a subtle six-degree angle, features robust slab serifs and a dynamic tension between rounded curves and sharp joints. Designed in a single weight, Williamson Italic is ideal for book covers, menus, and logos, offering a striking and versatile aesthetic.