Phaeton…”a very informal formal font”
Philadelphia illustrator Kevin Cornell and California graphic designer Randy Jones have teamed up to create an exciting new font family—Phaeton. It’s tall and ornate, yet neat and simple…a proper Victorian design with a handwritten, organic feel.
Kevin himself sums it up best: “It’s like the typographic equivalent of showing up to brunch in a tuxedo that’s all rumpled because you were out the entire night before, carousing and merry-making, and making gentleman’s bets on the horses.”
He’s right—it does actually make you think of gentleman’s bets and coattails, and that’s what they were going for…a Victorian inspired serif. Kevin’s research for another project, a graphic novel version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, included a lot of Victorian ornamentation. In fact, the name ‘Phaeton’ is a type of early 19th century carriage.
It’s not just pretty either, it has nearly 600 characters, ornate banners and even 49 glyphs for words like ‘and’, ‘the’ and ‘with’. One of Cornell’s favorite features is the lowercase swash variants designed by Randy…”I’m also partial to the upper-case ‘K’. It’s hard to find a good ‘K’ sometimes, I use it a lot.”
For the most part Kevin drew the characters and Randy translated them into an actual font. Phaeton started as a side project for both of them back in the Fall of 2008. They sent the beta version to Veer by May of 2009, and it was officially released two months later in July.
Fans of the font can look forward to another collaboration from the duo; a san-serif font to compliment Phaeton. No word on a time range yet, but based on this first project, it’s definitely something to keep an eye out for.
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Nice stuff, Hung. You must be excited about font support in CSS3.