P22 Type Foundry is a digital

type foundry A type foundry is a company that designs or distributes typefaces. Before digital typography, type foundries manufactured and sold metal and wood typefaces for hand typesetting, and matrices for line-casting machines like the Linotype and ...

and

letterpress printing Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing. Using a printing press, the process allows many copies to be produced by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against sheets or a continuous roll of paper. A worker co ...

studio based in

Rochester, New York Rochester () is a city in the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, and Yonkers, with a population of 211,328 at the 2020 United States census. Located i ...

. The company was created in 1994 in

Buffalo, New York Buffalo is the second-largest city in the U.S. state of New York (behind only New York City) and the seat of Erie County. It is at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of the Niagara River, and is across the Canadian border from Sou ...

by co-founders Richard Kegler and

Carima El-Behairy ''Ozola'' is a genus of moths in the family Geometridae first described by Francis Walker in 1861. Description Palpi porrect (extending forward), clothed with hair and reaching beyond the frons. Antennae of male ciliated. Abdomen and legs are ...

. The company is best known for its type designs, which have appeared in films (e.g.

Harry Potter ''Harry Potter'' is a series of seven fantasy novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The novels chronicle the lives of a young wizard, Harry Potter, and his friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, all of whom are students a ...

Suburbicon ''Suburbicon'' is a 2017 American black comedy crime film directed by George Clooney and co-written by the Coen brothers, Clooney, and Grant Heslov. It stars Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Noah Jupe, and Oscar Isaac, and follows a mild-mannered fa ...

) and on commercial products (e.g.

Trader Joe's Trader Joe's is an American chain of grocery stores headquartered in Monrovia, California. The chain has over 569 stores across the United States. The first Trader Joe's store was opened in 1967 by founder Joe Coulombe in Pasadena, Californi ...

, Founders Brewing Co.). The P22 Type Foundry retail font collection specializes in historical letterforms inspired by art, history, and science that otherwise have never been available previously in digital form. P22 works with museums and foundations to ensure the development of accurate historical typefaces, and with private clients to create custom bespoke fonts.

History

The name P22 has no specific significance and was used by founder Richard Kegler prior to the type foundry as a label for various art projects including an ambitious

mail art Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service. It initially developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence Scho ...

correspondence. Once P22 started developing fonts, they began to sell them packaged on floppy disks. These were very popular in museum stores because of their art history focus. P22 began to work with museums and artist foundations ( Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation,

Guggenheim Museum The Guggenheim Museums are a group of museums in different parts of the world established (or proposed to be established) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Museums in this group include: Locations Americas * The Solomon R. Guggenhei ...

, Burchfield-Penney Art Center,

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin F ...

Albright-Knox Art Gallery The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly known as the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, is an art museum at 1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York, in Delaware Park. the museum's Elmwood Avenue campus is temporarily closed for construction. It hosted ...

, et al.) to develop these art history based font sets. The floppy disks soon gave way in the late 1990s to CD-ROMs packaged in boxes with key charts. During this decade P22 moved locations three times within Buffalo to accommodate growth and manufacturing concerns. Later, with the adaptation of the internet as a means to deliver fonts, P22 reduced its staff and moved to its last Buffalo location. P22 went virtual for a few years when founder Richard Kegler became the Director of the Book Arts at

Wells College Wells College is a private liberal arts college in Aurora, New York. The college has cross-enrollment with Cornell University and Ithaca College. For much of its history it was a women's college. Wells College is located in the Finger Lakes re ...

in Aurora, NY. When Kegler ended his tenure at Wells in 2019, P22 once again coalesced into a studio location in Rochester, NY.

P22 Type Collections

P22 as independent type foundry consists of a few partners and outside contractors, who create the core P22 collection fonts. However P22 licenses new exclusive type designs from independent designers and makes them available via the International House of Fonts (IHOF) collection, since 2001. In 2003, P22 acquired the collection of Ted Staunton (briefly known as the Sherwood Type Collection), which consists of expertly designed alphabets that have historical basis, but tend toward the fanciful and mythic. Staunton continues to design and publish new fonts to this collection. In 2004, P22 acquired the Lanston Type Co. from Gerald Giampa, and continues to update and publish fonts from this renowned collection of type. Known as the Lanston Type Collection (LTC), it contains classic type designs from the likes of Fredric Goudy,

Sol Hess Sol Hess (born 1886, Philadelphia, PA – d. 1953) was an American typeface designer. After a three-year scholarship course at Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Design, he began at Lanston Monotype in 1902, rising to typographic man ...

, Bruce Rogers, among many others. In 2005, Richard Kegler initiated the Rimmer Type Foundry with Jim Rimmer, to make his proprietary type designs available to a larger audience. Because Jim Rimmer is a Canadian national artistic treasure, the digital holdings of this division were repatriated to Patrick Griffin of Canada Type in 2012. In 2012, P22 partnered with the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum to publish a collection of

wood type In letterpress printing, wood type is movable type made out of wood. First used in China for printing body text, wood type became popular during the nineteenth century for making large display typefaces for printing posters, because it was lig ...

revivals. A portion of every sale of the Hamilton Wood Type Collection (HWT) fonts goes to help fund the museum's mission.

Notable P22 Typefaces

*P22 Underground Pro, originally published 1997 when the London Transport Museum licensed the original Edward Johnston font made for the

London Underground The London Underground (also known simply as the Underground or by its nickname the Tube) is a rapid transit system serving Greater London and some parts of the adjacent counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and Hertfordshire in England. The U ...

to the P22 Type Foundry. *P22 Cezanne Pro originally designed by Michael Want 1996, and expanded in 2005. This script font is nearly ubiquitous and used on all kinds of commercial graphic design and packaging. * P22 Operina Pro designed by James Grieshaber, was licensed by

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

and made available within the

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 (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

as Trattatello. * P22 Marcel is more than just a script typeface, it is the product of a journey undertaken by designer

Carolyn Porter Carolyn is a female given name, a variant of Caroline. Other spellings include Karolyn, Carolyne, Carolynn or Carolynne. Caroline itself is one of the feminine forms of Charles. List of Notable People *Carolyn Bennett (born 1950), Canadian pol ...

to learn the fate of Marcel Heuzé, a Frenchman conscripted into labor during World War II, whose handwritten letters provided source material for the font.

P22 Publications

P22 self publishes from time to time. They published the ''Indie Fonts'' books (a collection of 3 volumes) in the early 2000s, to illuminate the work of small independent type designers. P22 produced a documentary film in 2011 called ''Making Faces'', to document the process of book artist Jim Rimmer as he developed a traditional metal font, from concept drawing through to casting in lead. P22 has also published ''Savage Impressions'', a comprehensive book on the work of artist and letterpress-printer Bruce Licher and his Independent Project Records & Press.

P22 / Atom Smash Records

P22/Atom Smash Records is P22's music publishing branch. Originally started to promote and publish local Buffalo, NY bands, they have gone on to produce nineteen releases, including reissues of

Rod McKuen Rodney Marvin McKuen (; April 29, 1933 – January 29, 2015) was an American poet, singer-songwriter, and actor. He was one of the best-selling poets in the United States during the late 1960s. Throughout his career, McKuen produced a wide range ...

records, a techno band called The William Caslon Experience, and the latest release is a vinyl LP of Bruce Licher's demos called Tape Excavation to accompany the ''Savage Impressions'' book.

History

P22 Type Collections

Notable P22 Typefaces

P22 Publications

P22 / Atom Smash Records

References

External links