The Brill Types

Focusing on the development of custom fonts for the 330-year-old Dutch scholarly publishing house Brill, John Hudson looks at how design decisions proceed from a technical brief and a detailed analysis of the client's needs. In particular, he shows how such analysis encourages the questioning of past practices and promotes innovation. The result, a family of four fonts each containing more than 5000 glyphs, combines neoclassical conventions, historical re-imagining, and radical technical solutions.