Typeface Design for the Athelas Font Family
Book serif optimised for both offset printing and screen, recognised for use in Apple's iBooks and OS X Mavericks
Athelas is a book typeface family designed by Veronika Burian and José Scaglione at TypeTogether, originally released in 2006. It draws on the tradition of British fine-book printing, pairing fluid roman shapes with a more angular italic while maintaining no sharp edges anywhere in the character set. The family covers Latin, monotonic Greek (Irene Vlachou), and Cyrillic (Tom Grace) scripts, and is recognised for its use in Apple's iBooks app and the desktop operating system Mavericks.
Set in Athelas
Insights
- The italic is deliberately more angular than the roman, creating textural contrast without introducing sharp terminals anywhere in the set.
- Whitespace is treated as a structural element — explicitly managed across margins, columns, line spacing, word spacing, and counter interiors.
- Greek and Cyrillic scripts were handled by dedicated specialists (Irene Vlachou and Tom Grace respectively), not by the primary designers.
- Won Tipos Latinos (2006) and first prize at the Granshan Type Design Competition (2008).
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