Fortescue

Originally drawn in 2009 for artist Jake Spicer as part of a small website and branding project over a period of nine months, Fortescue was initially commercially released in December 2009. The name ‘Fortescue’ derives from a dwelling in Sidmouth, Devon (UK) where the artist began his career.

Over the years Fortescue has been used in a variety of settings and applications, and has been modified as a bespoke variant for GQ Magazine (Germany). As part of our larger work to re-master and extend our full commercial library (from 2017 onwards), the Fortescue family has been extended, refreshed and remastered into further weights, styles, language support and OpenType features.

Fortescue was updated in 2019 to span three subfamilies, each with varying optical sizes: a Text variant for text and running copy usage, where the contrast between stroke width is at its lowest; a Display for larger usage cases, where the stroke width is at its highest and lastly a Median, that sits between Text and Display.

Fortescue is available in 4 weights  — Light, Regular, SemiBold, Bold; all with corresponding Italics, across three subfamilies — Text, Median and Display. It is available to license in two flavors; Standard (‘STD’) and Professional (‘PRO’). The PRO variant contains OpenType features to enable easier typographic control such as small caps, proportional lining numbers, tabular lining numbers and proportional oldstyle numbers.