We’re pretty excited about Emigre’s latest font release, Mr. Eaves — designed by Zuzana Licko to be the sans serif companion to her super popular Mrs. Eaves. It comes in a “sans” and a “modern” — the former like a warmer, quirkier Gill Sans and the latter geometricizing out some of the humanism (double-storey “a” and “g,” tailed “l”) and approaching Avenir or Neutra Text. They both have delicious italics, small caps and a heavy weight which has no correspondence in Mrs. Eaves (and which one hopes will help displace the frankly hideous Gill Sans Ultra Bold).
While we could write many posts on Emigre and its influence on the design world, here is the essential information. Their original fonts were among the earliest digital type for desktop publishing, their extremely influential magazine (1984–2005) was the epicenter of design discourse for over a decade. Once visually avant-garde, its last several issues were small books of essays on design with no visuals whatsoever. As a foundry, several of their fonts — Vendetta, Solex, Brothers — remain among our favorites.
Mrs. Eaves came out in 1996, when Sam and I were in design school and when OpenType wasn’t even a blip on the radar. Its most notable feature (because we weren’t the sort to analyze the fine nuances of a Baskerville revival) was that it had an associated font full of ligatures: 213 of ’em, including things like cky and OO. We were duly impressed, at the time having really only seen ï¬ and fl and Avant Garde’s 70s-tacular ligatures (back in vogue recently). So far, Mr. Eaves only has the standard ligatures but I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually see a line expansion that includes them (they’ve put up a note saying a version that is the proportions of Mrs. Eaves XL is forthcoming for instance).
I covet. I cannot afford.