New font family: Caltic

The fonts of the Caltic family have letters that snuggle together. The letter shapes Caltic-Festival and Caltic-Holiday are based on trapezoids with curved sides, each with one set of letters with the long edge of the trapezoid on the top and the other with the long edge on the bottom. The sample below shows Caltic-Festival regular and wide in top two lines and Caltic-Holiday regular and wide in the third and fourth lines. The bottom two lines illustrate Caltic-Straight regular and wide, in which the trapezoids have straight sides. When letters from the two sets alternate, the result is very bold, eye-catching text suitable for posters and titles.

The family name comes from the OpenType feature calt, a feature that sets contextual alternatives. With it one does not have to type first an upper-case key and then a lower-case key. The feature tells word processors that support it to automatically switch from upper to lower case and back.

The font reminds me of hand-drawn lettering that was done on posters and signs during the hippie era of the 1960s and 1970s, though I can find nothing quite like it. However, my inspiration for it is older, in a newspaper from 1932 that led to the typeface family PoultySign. Caltic (and Lentzers) are the result of searching for other possible ways to use the insight that sprang from that 1932 newspaper.

Caltic is now available on myfonts and fontspring.