URW Clarendon is a version of one of the world’s most ubiquitous font families. Clarendon, named after the Clarendon Press in Oxford, England, was designed in 1845 by Robert Besley for the Thorowgood and Co. foundry.
The typeface was registered under Britain’s Ornamental Designs Act of 1842, the first ever font to be protected as such. The act would have been notable simply for its historical circumstance, as it was the first to protect not just the utility of an object (as patents do), but rather the ornamental flair which defines its aesthetic character. When the governmental protections expired three years after, numerous other foundries began to make their own versions of the incredibly popular font–a typographic tradition that continues to this day. Particularly famous releases include the 1906 re-release under the name Consort by Stephenson Blake, an engineering company which owned the original matrices and punches, a 1953 cut by Haas Type Foundry based on Besley’s original version, and the Bauer Type Foundry’s 1995 Volta (Europe) / Fortune (US).
The font was incredibly popular in Europe throughout its lifespan, being used for not only a number of commercial uses, but also governmental documents and proclamations. In particular, it saw extensive use by the German Empire during the World War I era for both internal official documents as well as external messages to be posted for public viewing.
At the same time, a slightly different version of the font now known as French Clarendon rose in popularity in the United States. The font, commonly known for its use in the Wild West days on the American frontier, is a Clarendon font with “reverse stress” or “reverse contrast” whereby the thin parts of the letters are made thick and the thick parts thin. This style has remained popular for its attention-grabbing novelty, but it the original Clarendon typeface still far outpaces it in use and elegance.
With its thick strokes, thick slab serifs, and fat ball terminals arranged on a vertical axis with low contrast and a tiny aperture, the Clarendon font seems to capture some ideal version of what a font should be. It is, in every sense of the word, classic — the classic, perhaps. It is so ubiquitous that it has captured the imagination through a nearly memetic conquest. For projects that needs to evoke not only a sense of history, but also suggest a certain normality to the reader, there can be no better font than Clarendon. It is, for example, used in the logo types of companies like Wells Fargo and Sony in an attempt to evoke the long histories of each company and their omnipresence in the lives of consumers.
URW Clarendon was designed by URW Studio, based on the 1950s version of Clarendon made by Hermann Eidenbenz for the renowned Haas Type Foundry. URW Studio is one of Germany’s leading foundries and it has also established itself as a prominent member of the international graphic design industry. In addition to adding to its catalog of over 3,000 Latin fonts, about 500 of which are on offer at YouWorkForThem, the studio is also known for its innovative font and software products, as well as its IKARUS font design and production software system which is used by font designers from all around the world to produce many of the fantastic fonts we see every day. URW Clarendon is one such font, produced in-house with the IKARUS software.
Please contact us to learn more about the wide variety of fonts that we have on offer. From new cuts of old fonts to historically inspired fonts to fonts of a wholly original character–we have it all.
