Typeface Design for Long-Form Print and Web Text
Nine numeral styles per weight, selectable via OpenType
Fedra Serif is a contemporary serif typeface released by Typotheque in 2003, with Latin, Arabic, Georgian, and Greek designed by Peter Biľak. It synthesises humanistic handwriting rhythm with rational construction informed by a coarse computer-screen grid, yielding a large x-height, open counters, short ascenders and descenders, and simplified stroke terminations suited to small sizes. The family spans ten scripts—Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean—through a team of specialist script designers. A bespoke phonetic variant was commissioned by HarperCollins for Collins dictionaries.
Set in Fedra Serif
Insights
- Vertical stems were drawn to thicken toward the baseline, a deliberate structural choice Typotheque attributes to improved stability at small sizes.
- Each weight ships with nine numeral variants—proportional old-style (default), lining, tabular lining, tabular old-style, small caps, superior, inferior, circled, and circled inverted—switchable via OpenType features.
- The Arabic script was co-designed by Peter Biľak, Bahman Eslami, and Kristyan Sarkis, with Tarek Atrissi as contributor.
- The Collins dictionary phonetic font is a specific glyph-set for that commission, not a general-purpose IPA font.
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