Typekit Practice

About face: Urbana

Nick Cox, writing for Typekit:

Most notable among Urbana’s features is the cut and carved style of its glyphs. This is an aesthetic nod to the days of letterpress printing, in which a counterpunch was made to create the negative space (or counters) of the letters into a punch. The punch, in turn, created the copper matrix into which molten metal was poured to create the lines of type that would eventually be inked and printed. In Urbana, the counters of many of the glyphs reference this era, exhibiting a tension between, for example, the curve of the outside of the bowl of the lowercase b, and the sharp corner inside the counter. This technique is carried over into other aspects of the letter anatomy, such as the ascender, also illustrated by the lowercase b.