The P22 Type Foundry and the International House of Fonts (IHOF) have announced Wedge, a font by architect Bruce Rotherham. The design of the font purportedly takes the history of the Roman letter into full consideration.
Rotherham (1926-2004) was inspired by Herbert Bayer’s ‘universal alphabet’ created at the Bauhaus in 1927. While he admired Bayer’s pure geometry, Rotherham felt it was “virtually unreadable.” The Bauhaus-inspired inclination for architectural publications to use sans serif faces provoked Rotherham to consider how a readable Roman book face might be approached using some of Bayer’s same principles of simplification, but also retracing the evolution and use of the Roman form in an analytic manner.
The Wedge alphabet was started in 1947 when Rotherham was an architecture student at the University of Auckland. In 1958, after years of development and consultation with his father, who was a master printer, Rotherham approached Monotype to consider producing his typeface for commercial release.
Over 60 years after it was first conceived, Wedge is now available from P22. Introductory sale pricing is available through April 30. Go to https://www.p22.com/ for more info.