Skip to content

Made with FontLab: Dave Lawrence

Bodoni Casale is not a Bodoni revival in the careful, museum-conservator sense. It’s three Bodoni revivals — Casale, Ferrara, Terracina — each a different printed source, each digitised at the level of detail that only matters when somebody looks at the page from six inches away. That’s the California Type Foundry house style, and Dave Lawrence does it in FontLab.

Bodoni Casale by Dave Lawrence / California Type Foundry

Lawrence calls them the Hi-res Font™ Series — pitch-perfect classics from hi-res scans. The catalogue runs to seven public entries on the gallery: three Bodonis, CAL Grotesk, Fra Luca (after Bruce Rogers), Hermanz Titling (after Hermann Zapf), and Oceanwide. Six of them are revivals after named historical sources; the precision required is not negotiable.

Asked what FontLab gives him, Lawrence is unusually direct for a type designer:

FontLab is powerful enough that you can just work from start to finish inside one program. I love all the new FontLab 8 features. I’m hugely enjoying FontLab 8 in dark mode. It looks AMAZING. It feels amazing. Drawing is extra snappy.

For example, you can do unlimited axes and masters. In some font editors, this is not possible, requiring additional programming in a second application. No extra steps in FontLab. This saves time.

The new Stroke panel along with the Thickness tool is a game changer. There had been a lot of talk about how we should be using “outline skeletons” to make our fonts. There’s been a lot of theoretical work, but FontLab 8 is the first app to put that in practice in an integrated way.

If you want pro results, you have to invest in a pro font editor. Period. (…) FontLab allowed me to make our Hi-res Font™ Series. Accurate, pitch-perfect classics from hi-res scans. Without FontLab 8, I could do just about nothing.

— Dave Lawrence, California Type Foundry

CAL Grotesk by Dave Lawrence / California Type Foundry

The “fractional coordinates” remark elsewhere in his testimonial is the giveaway about how Hi-res actually works. Most font editors quantise to integer units; the Bodoni revivals lean on FontLab’s sub-unit precision so the trapped ink and the optical compensations from the original lead don’t get mashed flat by rounding. That’s the kind of detail that does not show up in the marketing copy because it’s boring to non-revivalists, and load-bearing to people who do this for a living.

The skeleton-based Stroke panel and Thickness tool he mentions are the FontLab 8 additions: you draw the spine of the letter and let the tool put weight on it, instead of drawing both sides of every stroke by hand. Lawrence says he plans to build entire families on that workflow. For a one-person foundry shipping seven families, that is the difference between this year and next year.

More from Dave Lawrence

Browse California Type Foundry →