DuttonCast

Marc Austin & Stephen Paxford, 2023
Digital Font (OFT) and Specification Poster — 420mm x 297mm

DuttonCast is a typeface designed as an investigation into the letterforms found within two bronze medals: https://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/collections/getrecord/WAGMU_M598 created by Ron Dutton. This humanist typeface utilises optically even stroke widths, with a minor amount of stoke contrast and rounded terminals. The font mimics the idiosyncrasies of Dutton’s hand-lettering cast in bronze. The character set has been extended from those found in the medals to a complete typeface of 204 glyphs.

The Specification Poster is laser engraved on Peregrina Majestic Medal Bronze paper (with a ripple embossing) supplied by G.F Smith.
www.gfsmith.com/peregrina-majestic-medal-bronze

Creating 204 glyphs for the font character set was certainly challenging. Our reference medals contained only uppercase letterforms for specific words (21 of 26 letters of the roman alphabet). We really had to understand the DNA of the shapes, and deconstructed stroke patterns to build a cohesive set of principles to design from.­­­

The building blocks for this approach came from the uppercase R, S, U, and Z — which characterise proportional shapes and stroke directions. From these shapes, and with reference to the other available letterforms, we were able to create a ‘spine’ for each character to retain the physicality of the bronze casting, and the humanist craftsmanship of their creation.

In extending the character set to lowercase and punctuation (which do not exist in our reference medals) we wanted to apply the visual language of Dutton’s shapes and constraints of the casting process. We were reminded of Robert Bringhurst’s seminal text: The Elements of Typographic Style, in which he despairs at the inconsistent design of supplementary characters (obscure punctuation, and less-used glyphs such as diacritics), and made great efforts to ensure proportional continuity in weight, spacing, and positioning.

The final font contains upper and lowercase characters with OpenType alternatives for R, S, and X, standard and discretionary ligatures including TT, and ty, numerals, punctuation, and diacritics. Please download and use DuttonCast for free. We only ask that you share your creations with us by tagging our Instagram @wlv_gd

Marc Austin & Stephen Paxford
Senior Lecturers for BA(Hons) Graphic Design
www.wlv.ac.uk/courses/ba-hons-graphic-design/