Plethora
RELEASED BY:
Sudtipos ☞
DESIGNERS:
Alejandro Paul
RELEASE DATE:
Week 18
DETAILS:
• An 'old-style serif design inspired by the work of late nineteenth century type designer Julius Herriet.
• Plethora is billed as a study in ligature-making.
• Available as a family of 18 fonts, or as a set of roman and italic variable fonts.
LINKS:
From the Foundry:
“A few years ago I've discovered the work of one of the most prolific typeface designers of the Bruce Type Foundry in NYC during late nineteenth century. Browsing Julius Herriet's work I found a very unique kind of ligatures in his patented "Old Style Ornamented" type design. Some letters were designed with a little top tail that allowed them to connect to each other. After that, I found that he also designed a single italic weight of the same font 7 years later.
Since the beginning of the Opentype days I’ve been deeply obsessed with exploring different ways to build ligatures, so that lead me up to this point where I felt the need to create “Plethora”, this new font inspired by Herriet’s work. Extrapolating weights, adding variable technology and playing with additional interconnected letters and alternates. Definitely, Plethora means a large or excessive amount of something, and this font tries to bring back this abundance of details two centuries later. Available in 9 weights, from roman to italic, and also as variable format, “Plethora” supports plenty of latin languages and is a perfect choice for today’s design tides.”
FOUNDRY MARKETING:
FOUNDRY SPECIMEN:
NOTES:
Sudtipos keeps cranking out typefaces, and they continually surprise and delight. I’m so glad the ligature is not dead, with Plethora being a true study in ligatures. In the description, we find what may be the understatement of the year from designer Alejandro Paul: “I’ve been deeply obsessed with exploring different ways to build ligatures.” If you know anything about Alejandro Paul’s work, you’ll know this statement to be supremely true, and I’m so glad he had a chance to dive deeply into this indulgent arena of type design, he’s certainly earned it.
Paul writes “Plethora means a large or excessive amount of something, and this font tries to bring back this abundance of details two centuries later.”… well I’d say he’s done just that. There’s an old-world feel to Plethora, almost Elzevir or Victorian, without straying definitively into any of those arenas. Those giraffe-head serifs, the large tv dish terminals on select cap characters, the whispy swashes, and the seemingly unnecessary umbilical joins connecting characters that probably have no business being connected… they all add up to a wildly impressive stack of typographic moments; in fact, there are so many, you may not ever be able to find (and certainly not use) them all.
I can see Plethora being used widely over time in niche branding projects and personal projects, and eventually purchased as a font that can sit on the bench to be used when needed, but really owned when the work is done and a designer just wants to have some fun.
Sudtipos has been built up over the years to be nearly synonymous with scripts, ligatures, and expressive tools for brands. Plethora fits quite nicely into this picture, perhaps even as the cherry on top of its already large legacy cake.