Staunton Script
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One of my earliest font designs. Designed to be used for personalized stationery, the originals were pencil-drawn at a very large scale, reduced down photographically and multiple images assembled on a master, from which sheets of transfer lettering were made (after the fashion of the once-well-known Letraset product). In the catalogue of a gallery exhibition organized by the Alcuin Society of Vancouver, a book arts appreciation club of which Ted was once a member, internationally renowned poet and typographic expert Robert Bringhurst wrote of this and other designs: "Another British Columbia type designer is Ted Staunton. He is a skilled calligrapher, and his type designs are in general much lighter and more lyrical than [Jim] Rimmer's. His Staunton Script (1981) and Avoca (1984-6) are both chancery italics with swash capitals, made only in display sizes. He has also designed some handsome roman alphabets -- a titling face christened Auburn and a bicameral font entitled Fosse [since renamed Mercian], which appears sober enough for text work -- but these have yet to be manufactured in any form. "One of the major challenges in European type design since the late sixteenth century has been the cutting of romans and italics in matched pairs. The habit of mixing both faces in the same text, which began as a mere Baroque exuberance, is now entrenched convention . . . To date, both Rimmer and Staunton have chosen not to design paired romans and italics. Rimmer's faces, rooted as they are in the early humanist tradition, hark back to a time before any italic type had ever been cut, much less matched with a matching roman. And Staunton's chancery italics stand in the Cinquecento [sixteenth century Italian] tradition, in which italics are made to function as independent faces, without the support of a matching roman. While they defy commercial custom in this regard, Rimmer and Staunton stand in company with such designers as Emery Walker, William Morris, Rudolf Koch and Victor Hammer. We may come to learn that these two local artists are no more behind the times than ahead of them, minor prophets of a relaxation in our ossified ediorial and typographic conventions." (From Hand to Hand: a Gathering of Book Arts in British Columbia, The Alcuin Society, 1986) 
Contact Ted Staunton to enquire about the projected release date. |
