Austin was first designed in 2003 for the elegant display typography of Harpers & Queen, a British fashion magazine, and Paul Barnes had long wanted to augment the delicate display face with a more rugged version for smaller sizes. He finally found the time, and the result is a highly personable text face firmly in the British tradition, hewing much closer to the original types—cut by Richard Austin in the late 18th century for the publisher John Bell—that had originally inspired the Austin family.
Available in five weights, Austin Text matches the full range of the original Austin family, going all the way up to the heavy Fat weight. While Austin has a narrow proportion, Austin Text matches the comfortable proportions of Richard Austin’s original text faces, and the elegance of his italics. The italics have the same set of swashes as the display, and the romans feature small capitals. The family offers several different kinds of figures, with the three-quarter-height style favored by Austin and Bell as the default, along with traditional oldstyle and lining figures. Austin Text makes its first appearance in the brand new redesign of AFAR magazine by new creative director Elizabeth Spiridakis Olson, launching in January 2014.
