Iowan Old Style is a

digital Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits. Technology and computing Hardware *Digital electronics, electronic circuits which operate using digital signals **Digital camera, which captures and stores digital i ...

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are list of type ...

Bitstream A bitstream (or bit stream), also known as binary sequence, is a sequence of bits. A bytestream is a sequence of bytes. Typically, each byte is an 8-bit quantity, and so the term octet stream is sometimes used interchangeably. An octet may ...

in 1991. Iowan Old Style is inspired by serif typefaces from

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

, now called the “ old-style” or Venetian model of typeface design, with influence from Downer’s work as hand-painter of signs. Compared to the historical models it is based on, Iowan has a higher

x-height upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...

, meaning that the lower-case letters are taller and appear larger and wider, producing a design that is suitable for

display Display may refer to: Technology * Display device, output device for presenting information, including: ** Cathode ray tube, video display that provides a quality picture, but can be very heavy and deep ** Electronic visual display, output devi ...

and on-screen use. It is used as a default font on the Apple Books application and is included as a system font on

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

Design

Downer has described the design "more Venetian than Aldine" and influenced by lettering. It has diamond-dots (tittles) on the “i” and “j” similar to the

Arts and Crafts A handicraft, sometimes more precisely expressed as artisanal handicraft or handmade, is any of a wide variety of types of work where useful and decorative objects are made completely by one’s hand or by using only simple, non-automated re ...

-influenced

Goudy Old Style Goudy Old Style (also known as just Goudy) is an Serif#Old-style, old-style serif typeface originally created by Frederic Goudy, Frederic W. Goudy for American Type Founders (ATF) in 1915. Suitable for text and display applications, Goudy Old Styl ...

. Iowan began as a design for ITC, but after the company dropped plans to release it, the font was bought up by Matthew Carter of

, who digitized and released it.

later revisited the design, adding

ornaments An ornament is something used for decoration. Ornament may also refer to: Decoration *Ornament (art), any purely decorative element in architecture and the decorative arts *Biological ornament, a characteristic of animals that appear to serve on ...

and titling capitals. The character set includes small capitals and

ligatures Ligature may refer to: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...

, as well as Cyrillic characters. Stephen Coles, an expert on digital fonts, describes its design as “hardworking.”

Gallery

File:Oscar wilde english renaissance of art 2.png, An extended setting of a text by

Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is ...

in Iowan Old Style, showing justified text and leading between the lines. File:Iowan Old Style x-height.png, Iowan Old Style’s

compared to other serif fonts: higher than Caslon and Bembo, used in fine book printing, but lower than

Lucida Bright Lucida (pronunciation: ) is an extended family of related typefaces designed by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes and released from 1984 onwards. The family is intended to be extremely legible when printed at small size or displayed on a low-resol ...

which is intended for maximum legibility.

References

External links

Commercial release
(MyFonts)
Fonts in Use

Font designer John Downer
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Klingspor Museum The Klingspor-Museum is a museum in Offenbach, Germany, specializing in the art of modern book production, typography and type. It includes a collection of fine art books from Karl Klingspor, one of the owners of Klingspor Type Foundry in Offe ...

article on John Downer's work
John Downer Speedballs
(Typographica)
Sostav
(Russian) - page on Downer's lettering and influences

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Luc Devroye Luc P. Devroye is a Belgian computer scientist and mathematician and a James McGill Professor in the School of Computer Science of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Devroye specializes in the probabilistic analysis of algorithms, r ...

's page on Downer and other Iowa-based type designers {{OS X typefaces Digital typefaces Typefaces with text figures Old style serif typefaces Typefaces designed by John Downer