"This is a font that wears flowery bell bottoms and plays a Vox organ while dancing around in a Travolta outfit."
Probably as a reaction to the pragmatism of modernist design, the seventies saw an explosion of buoyant, vivacious typography. Psichedelia fueled a return to the melting, lush shapes of art nouveau while pop culture embraced the usage of funky, joyful lettering for advertising, product design and tv titling. New low-cost technologies like photo-lettering and rub-on transfer required new fonts to be expressive rather than legible, pushing designers to produce, bubbly, high-spirited masterpieces, where geometric excess and calligraphic inventions melted joyfully.
Copacetic!
Hey Mama
Last night I had a dream:
I was at Font Woodstock
Freitag Light
Freitag Light Italic
Freitag Book
Freitag Book Italic
Freitag Medium
Freitag Medium Italic
Freitag Bold
Freitag Bold Italic
Freitag Heavy
Freitag Heavy Italic
Freitag Display M
Freitag Display M Italic
Freitag Display L
Freitag Display L Italic
Freitag Display XL
Freitag Display XL Italic
Probably as a reaction to the pragmatism of modernist design, the seventies saw an explosion of buoyant, vivacious typography. Psychedelia fueled a return to the melting, lush shapes of Art Nouveau while Pop culture embraced the usage of funky, joyful lettering for advertising, product design and tv titling. New low-cost technologies like photo-lettering and rub-on transfer required new fonts to be expressive rather than legible, pushing designers to produce, bubbly, high-spirited masterpieces, where geometric excess and calligraphic inventions melted joyfully.
Freitag is Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini's homage to this era and its typography. His starting point was the design of a heavy sans serif with humanist condensed proportions, flared stems and reverse contrast, that generated both the main family, and a variant display subfamily.
The main typeface family slowly builds the tension and design exuberance along the weight axis - a bit like our desire for the weekend increases during the week. In Light and Medium weights the font shows a more controlled, medium-contrast design, tightly spaced for maximum display effect. The Book weight follows the same design but uses a more relaxed letter spacing to allow usage in smaller sizes and short body copy. As weight increases in the Bold weight the style becomes more expressive, with a visible reverse contrast building up and culminating in the Heavy weight with his clearly visible "bell bottoms" feel.
In the display sub-family the design is pushed further by introducing variant letterforms that have a stronger connection to calligraphy and lettering. Also, the weight range becomes a optical one, with weights marked as Medium, Large, XLarge, as bringing the contrast and the boldness to the extreme creates smaller counterspaces that require bigger usage sizes. Another important addition of the display subfamiily is the connected italics that sport swash capitals and cursive letterforms, developed with logo design and ultra-expressive editorial design in mind. To balance the extreme contrast in the XL weight, contrast of punctuation is reduced, creating a rich, highly-dinamyc texture wherever diacritics and marks are used in the text.
The full family includes 16 styles + 4 variable fonts, allowing full control of the design over its tree-hugging design space. All 20 fonts share an extended latin charset with open type features including case sensitive forms, single and double story variants and alternate glyphs.
According to its creator, "Freitag is the typeface that sounds like an imaginary Woodstock where on the stage with Jimi Hendrix with Novarese, Motter, Excoffon and Benguiat playing onstage with Jimi Hendrix". Jeepers creepers!
Features
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(¡H!)Case-Sensitive Forms
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RagStylistic Set 1
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AvatarStylistic Set 2
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bayStylistic Set 3
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1a 2oOrdinals
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H123Superscript
Variable Typefaces
Freitag Variable
VARIABLE FONTS ARE ONLY AVAILABLE WITH THE FULL FAMILY PACKAGE, MAY NOT WORK WITH ALL THE SOFTWARE
Music to Expand your Mind
All the Colours of Psychedelic Rock!
Psychedelic rock, style of rock music popular in the late 1960s that was largely inspired by hallucinogens, or so-called “mind-expanding” drugs such as marijuana and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide; “acid”), and that reflected drug-induced states through the use of feedback, electronics, and intense volume. Emerging in 1966, psychedelic rock became the soundtrack of the wider cultural exploration of the hippie movement. Initially centred on the West Coast of the United States, where the early Grateful Dead was the house band at novelist Ken Kesey’s Acid Test multimedia “happenings,” psychedelia soon spread from the San Francisco Bay area to the rest of the country and then to Europe to become the major rock phenomenon of the late 1960s. In addition to the Grateful Dead, West Coast psychedelic bands included Love, the Charlatans, the Doors, and the Jefferson Airplane, the last of which featured the striking vocals of Grace Slick and scored Top Ten hit singles in 1967 with “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” Meanwhile, the 13th Floor Elevators from Austin, Texas, epitomized the darker, more psychotic frenzy of acid rock—characterized by overdriven guitars, amplified feedback, and droning guitar motifs influenced by Eastern music. Led by the wayward talent of Roky Erickson, a gifted musician who was later hospitalized for mental illness, the 13th Floor Elevators released four frenetic albums featuring bizarre jug-blowing blues before imploding in 1969. On the East Coast, the Velvet Underground symbolized a nihilistic cool version of psychedelia, picking up on its sonic techniques yet distancing themselves from the more playful “flower power” culture.
