Name: Plantin Now
Type: Retail typeface
Publisher: Monotype
Release year: 2025
Purchase links: MyFonts (Static) Myfonts (Variable)
Plantin Now is an updated digital version of Monotype’s Plantin. Variable font version supports weight and optical size axes.
The original typeface was produced under the direction of Frank Hinman Pierpont and released in 1913. It was based on a specimen of Robert Granjon’s Gros Cicero (1569) in Plantin Moretus Museum. The specimen, made much later in 1905, was famously not demonstrating the original state, using the different lowercase a.
Plantin seems to appeal differently to different people. I, for one, never liked the digital version that looked like a caption font, though it’s obviously great for that purpose. It was when the metal version, specifically The Lord Of The Rings books, that I understood its true appeal, and the only version I was familiar with was never representative. It was another case of the classic wisdom: ‘you should check the metal version’.
Plantin 110 (Regular and Italic) was drawn in four sets of drawing: micro set for around 5–6 pts, caption for 6–9 pts, text for 10–13 pts, and display for 14–72 pts. In my revival, I wanted to support optical sizes and picked the caption and display sets as caption and display masters. I did not think it was necessary to digitise the text set, the body text range, as the transition from the micro to display was meaninglessly inconsistent and minor in my eyes that it wouldn’t have satisfied anything other than academic curiosity.
I think Bold deserves discussion. Monotype’s roman designs such as Bembo, Baskerville, and of course Plantin, suffer from proportion issues that I was never a fan of. They were typically less graceful compared to Regular, more widely proportioned, and less internally consistent due to technical limitations. One such example of the last point is lowercase m whose two counters are ‘wider’ than double of n. I therefore decided to bold weights from scratch.
Reviving a typeface in official capacity is wonderful in the sense that the designer has access to the original materials, but also comes with expectations on aesthetics. The lowercase a of the upright and rather Victorian flavour of the italic are non-negotiable quirks of Plantin that one might argue as historical mistakes. I remember discussing the Plantin revival project with Gerard Unger, and he suggested that I should correct the a. However, they have become iconic parts of the typeface in my view and something an official revival should not attempt to fix. At the same time, I was happy to discard the original Bolds go; the expectation and sense of responsibility is certainly up to the designer’s discretion.