Ballinger began life as a single-weight proprietary typeface called baasic, designed for Dublin-based design office aad. baasic was intended as a plain, hardworking grotesque: a simple tool for clear communication. We’ve developed it into a fully-featured eight-weight, three-width family. Sources include early 20th century jobbing sanses like Morris Benton’s News Gothic and Candia, a 70s-era typewriter face Josef Müller-Brockmann designed for Olivetti, which had unusually deep junctures that added energy to letters like m and n. The family takes its name from Raymond A. Ballinger, the great mid-century American designer, author of Lettering Art in Modern Use, and champion of elegance and readability. Ballinger has large counters and a generous x-height. Letters like a, e, and s open out gradually as they move from Thin to Black to maintain ample apertures, even in the darkest weights. Semi-oldstyle figures are available, as well as casesensitive punctuation and delimiters. Italics incorporate subtle ogee curves to lend warmth and energy to the page or screen. Russian, Bulgarian, and Serbian Cyrillics will be available in mid-2019.
