Welcome to my Favorite Font Friday series! Today I’m going to talk about unicase fonts, also known as unicameral fonts. Modern languages have two cases for each letter, upper and lower, unlike some earlier languages, for example Hebrew and Arabic, that only have one case per letter.
In 1950, American type designer, Bradbury Thompson, designed a unicase alphabet called Alphabet 26. He proposed a simplified alphabet to help in the identification of letters for early readers by getting rid of the upper- and lowercases of the 7 letters that are the same in both cases (C, O, S, V, W, X and Z). For 19 letters with different upper- and lowercases, he kept the uppercase versions of B, D, F, H, J, L, N, P, Q, R, T, U and the lowercase versions of a, e, g, i, k, m and y. Below is the resulting Alphabet 26.
Bradbury Thompson’s Alphabet 26, from aiga.org
Since then, several font houses have created unicase fonts. One of my favorites is a part of Filosofia’s family which was designed by Emigre. Below you can see the characters:
Below is an example of Filosophia Unicase in action:
I hope you enjoyed this installment of Favorite Font Friday. Check back every Friday for my favorite fonts or sign up below to receive my blog posts in your inbox. And be sure to follow me on Instagram and Facebook.
favorite font friday • typography • pomp creative • graphic design studio • washington, dc • annapolis, maryland
