Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a new season of summer shows with a typeface that draws from the playwright’s First Folio. Printed seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the Folio featured The Tempest, Comedy of Errors, As You Like It and Macbeth and is the reason audiences are still able to access these plays, as well as 14 others. Now celebrating 400 years, the theater is turning a selection of ornamental editorial devices from the 17th-century text into a new typeface with south London type design studio Typeland.
The new typeface, Amifer Folio, will appear across posters advertising the new season. The project was initiated by the Globe’s in-house design team. It entailed picking decorative patters from the First Folio, which were originally used as illustrative devices to break up text. Typeland worked through the Folio, reworking elements to create a base thematic treatment, before the bespoke layer font. The typeface uses an entirely uppercase alphabet, inspired by the decorative initials from the original Folio. For greater versatility, the Amifer Folio family features two separate styles – a simplified version in Amifer Folio Small and one with a greater number of elements and fills for larger sizes.
