Plantin Now
Omega Type Foundry · Frank Hinman Pierpont · 2025
A considered digital revival of Monotype's 1913 Plantin, with redrawn bold weights and optical size support via a variable font spanning caption and display masters.
About
Published by Monotype in 2025, Plantin Now revisits the original metal drawings of Plantin 110, using caption and display sets as the masters for its optical size axis rather than attempting to replicate every intermediate stage. The bold weights were drawn entirely from scratch to correct the proportion issues that have long plagued Monotype's roman revivals, including the inconsistent counter widths of the lowercase m. The typeface preserves the two most debated features of the original: the single-storey lowercase a and the upright Victorian character of the italic, treated here as defining quirks rather than historical errors to be corrected.
Classification
A revival of Monotype's 1913 Plantin, itself based on Robert Granjon's 1569 Gros Cicero, placing it firmly in the old-style tradition with characteristic stroke contrast, bracketed serifs and the distinctive single-storey lowercase a.