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Columba
Banner, Text & Ruby

Combining historical influences from the work of Miklós Kis (1650–1702), Hendrik van den Keere (1540–1580) Columba is an old-style text typeface ideal for use in complicated tight-set printing environments, editorial, book and magazine work. The narrow forms and rotating stress in curved strokes not only make Columba useful for columned text, but its subtle bends and inclines in-place of typically straight down-strokes give the font a warm and flowing feeling.

Devised along three axes – italic, weight and optical size – Columba has a caption size named ‘ruby’ (for 5–8pt) and a standard text size (for 9–14pt). Ruby is built around a system of ink traps, slab-like serifs and simplified stroke patterns making it easier to read at footnote-scale. The text size is ideal for articles and stories, and is designed with column width and line space efficiency in mind.

Columba is available in five weights — Regular, Medium, Semibold, Bold and Ultra with corresponding italics over two Optical Sizes — Text (for 9–14pt) and Ruby (for 5–8pt). It also has a hairline weight for large-scale display work. It is open to licensing in both Standard (‘STD’) and Professional (‘PRO’) versions. The latter contains additional Cyrillic and Greek scripts and OpenType features. In 2019, Columba won the Granshan Grand Prize for Non-Latin Scripts.

Release
2020

Version
1.001

Designer
Lewis McGuffie

Specimen
Columba

In Didot's Point System §1 point = 1⁄6 ligne = 1⁄72 French Royal inch = 15 625⁄41 559 mm ≤ 0.375 971 510 4 mm, however in practice mostly: 0.376 000 mm, i.e. + 0.0076%. ¶Both in Didot's and Fournier's systems, some point sizes have traditional names such as Cicero† (before introduction of point systems, type sizes were called by names such as Cicero, Pica, Ruby, Long Primer, etc.). ¶1 cicero = 12 Didot points = 1⁄6 French Royal inch = 62 500⁄13 853 mm ≤ 4.511 658 124 6 mm, also in practice mostly‡: 4.512 000 mm, i.e. + 0.0076%.

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System Typographic
Unit of Length
by printers Pannartz & Sweynheim
First Utilised in 1468, Italy
In the publication of Epistulae ad Familiares
+44 (0)20 3095 9782