Commercial Classics is live

For nearly a decade, we have been making new typefaces for the modern designer and releasing them as Commercial Type. Some of these designs draw from the past, but we never allowed the history to dominate the style; each typeface reinterprets the past through the prism of today. However, we have always seen this way of making typefaces as just one method; another path takes the past much more literally, recreating the old forms and making them useable for today by imagining how the original designers’ intentions could expand into new typefaces for contemporary design. This the aim of our new venture, Commercial Classics.

With our initial set of six families—including extensive workhorse serif and sans serif families, Brunel and Caslon Doric, along with four exuberant display families—we attempted to make new typefaces that retain the qualities of the originals, with all of their charms and quirks, and to follow a path of faithfulness to the ideas and forms of the past, even when the forms sometimes never existed. Our intention is for these historical forms to escape the past and come to life again. We think that they offer the contemporary designer a richer typographical palette to work with; a set of typefaces not tied to the past, simply informed by it.

Each Commercial Classics release is accompanied by an exhaustively researched and profusely illustrated article on the history of the genre and our process of bringing the historical materials into the present.

Update: Commercial Classics was originally launched as a standalone foundry with a separate website. This turned out not to be a great idea for a number of reasons, and the collection was integrated into the Commercial Type library in 2023.