Memoir by Stephen Rapp

Submitted by paul d hunt : 19.Jun.2008 5.45am

Taking inspiration from 18th century handwritten letters, journals and documents, Memoir is a romantic yet robust design. Its textured profile speaks of surface and age, but this face will look very much at home in contemporary design. Useful for menus, cards, packaging, and logos, its versatility will prove its worth. Unlike signature fonts from that era, Memoir is designed to set in a manner that connects fluidly as if it were actually written.

Designers will appreciate the many great typographic features in this OpenType font. Memoir uses ligatures in the most strategic way to mimic natural writing patterns. Many of these ligatures are programmed to work contextually such as at the beginning or end of a word. Alternates are also programmed contextually to avoid awkward clashes and to add to the flow and variety of writing. In current versions of InDesign, you can access glyphs through Stylistic Sets with various degrees of flourish useful for titling, endings and space fitting. Some capitals have as many as five variations. In the glyph menu, look for arrows that reveal a palette of alternate glyphs. The bullet arrow, for example, shows a palette full of extra flourishes, both freestanding and ones that attach to the beginning and ends of letters. Memoir even comes with a fraction feature which replaces numbers and slashes with true fractions. Select, the discretionary ligatures and get old style abbreviations for businesses, names and addresses.

A PDF sample:
http://www.veer.com/download/pdf/memoir_specimen.pdf
At Veer:
http://www.veer.com/products/typedetail.aspx?image=UMT0000329