GUST Cyklop fonts

A traditional Polish sans-serif high typographic contrast headings typeface

Description


The Cyclop typeface was designed in the 1920s at the workshop of Warsaw type foundry Odlewnia Czcionek J. Idzkowski i S-ka. This sans-serif typeface has a highly modulated stroke so it has high typographic contrast. The vertical stems are much heavier then horizontal ones. Most characters have thin rectangles as additional counters giving the unique shape of the characters.

The lead types of Cyclop typeface were produced in slanted variant at sizes 8-48 pt. It was heavily used for heads in newspapers and accidents prints. Typesetters used Cyclop in the inter-war period, during the occupation in the underground press. The typeface was used until the beginnings of the offset print and computer typesetting era. Nowadays it is hard to find the metal types of this typeface.

The font was generated using the Metatype1 package. Then the original set of characters was completed by adding the full set of accented letters and characters of the modern Latin alphabets (including Vietnamese).

The upright variant was generated and it was more complicated task than it appeared at the beginning. 11 upright letters of the Cyclop typeface were presented in the book by Filip Trzaska, Podstawy techniki wydawniczej (« Foundation of the publishing techonology »), Warsaw 1967. But even the author of the book does not know what was the source of the presented examples.

Caveats

 * 1) The font metadata says it's intended to be published under the usual GUST license (LPPL variant).
 * 2) However it also includes URW and URW+ copyrights, upstream needs to be contacted to clarify what those copyrights correspond to since I doubt URW ever released anything under the GUST license
 * 3) This licensing would not require building from source, though it would be nice to get the sources published and use them to build the Fedora OTFs.
 * 4) Upstream unfortunately has a deplorable attitude on licensing (see page 5 of this interview, and page 8 of this presentation), not understanding that muddy licensing just makes everyone waste major amounts of time and energy. Upstream needs to be contacted and convinced to put a clear licensing statement in the font archives as a detached txt file, and likewise on the font web page.

Additional information
High-quality work as usual from GUST.