Wales Serif
Following the release of Cymru Sans, Cymru Serif was developed as an extension to the type family for use in long form copy and editorial work. The core Sans design was translated into an transitional Serif construction, capitalizing on the inherently expressive nature of Serif designs and drawing on a wealth of disparate influences to create a unique and yet highly legible design.
- Typeface
- Cymru & Wales Serif
- Comissioner
- Smörgåsbord / Welsh Govt.
- Year
- 2018
- Styles
- Wales & Cymru Serif — 5 styles each Regular, Italic, Medium, Bold, Bold Italic
- Coverage
- Adobe Latin-A Extended
- Classification
- Serif
- URL
- visitwales.com
- smorgasbordstudio.com
As with the Sans, Cymru Serif draws on historic Welsh typography such as the Black Book of Carmarthen and the Red Book of Hergest, as well as Celtic pub signage. However, the Serif design also looks further afield — with influences from Dutch calligraphy and even languages such as Arabic and Icelandic for their more exuberant serif forms. The open connections in the “B”, “K”, “P”, “R”, “d”, and “&” reveal this calligraphic and gestural influence, while the curved “d” form speaks back to the original Sans design.
Bracketed and angular serifs juxtapose each other on the top and bottom of each letter form respectively, while historical references are built into the design of the serifs themselves — with chamfered edges referencing stone carving and giving the typeface its characteristic robustness.
Welsh orthography uses 29 letters (including eight digraphs)
This more exuberant design focus was balanced with an equal emphasis on legibility and editorial work. All eight Welsh digraphs — proven by external accessibility studies to increase legibility — were included across all styles in the Serif design, as well as Old Style numbers for long form text setting. The specific use cases of Cymru Serif lead to adjustments in form — for example reducing the x-height in the Bold style so that text can be set tighter in display settings.
The Serif addition to the Cymru type family leaves Wales with an extremely flexible typographical system, whereby each of the wide-ranging pillars of the Welsh government can have a distinct tone of voice within an overarching visual language.
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