Columba

Combining historical influences from the work of Miklós Kis (1650–1702) and Hendrik van den Keere (1540–1580) Columba is an old-style text typeface ideal for use in complicated tight-set printing environments, editorial, book and magazine work. The narrow forms and rotating stress in curved strokes make Columba useful for columned text, while its subtle bends and inclines in-place of typically straight down-strokes give the font a warm and flowing feeling.

Devised along three axes – italic, weight and optical size — Columba has a caption size named ‘Ruby’ (for 5–8pt) and a standard text size (for 9–14pt). Ruby is built around a system of ink traps, slab-like serifs and simplified stroke patterns making it easier to read at footnote-scale. The text size is ideal for articles and stories, and is designed with column width and line space efficiency in mind.

Columba is available in five weights — Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold and Ultra with corresponding italics over two optical sizes — Text (for 9–14pt) and Ruby (for 5–8pt). It also has a hairline weight for large-scale display work. It is open to licensing in both Standard (‘STD’) and Professional (‘PRO’) versions. The latter contains additional Cyrillic and Greek scripts and OpenType features. In 2019, Columba won the Granshan Grand Prize for Non-Latin Scripts.