Located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada Type is a digital type studio established by Patrick Griffin and Rebecca Alaccari in 2004. They are intensely passionate about their work and their unwavering energy bleeds into every one of their type designs. Canada Type has worked with an impressive list of companies that include Pixar, Disney, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC, and ABC.
While Rebecca and Patrick often devise their own inventive typefaces, they have a particular fondness for breathing new life into classical lettersets. Their revivals are epic re-explorations of beloved type designs, constructed with absolute respect and reverence toward the original typographers’ artistry. If there’s one thing that Patrick and Rebecca find most important in this genre of work, it’s maintaining a visual equilibrium between the spirit of the original font and the demands of contemporary designers.
A perfect example of this balance can be seen in Gaslon, a revival and slight reinterpretation of Corvina Black. Originally designed by A. Bihari for Visual Graphics Corp. in 1973, Corvina Black enjoyed its own share of popularity in spite of its glaring visual eccentricities. Several letters shared too many similarities with other letters, making legibility a bit of an issue with Corvina Black, even when used in the display applications for which it was intended.
Canada Type’s updated rendition, Gaslon, mitigates such impediments by providing additional alternates for most of the letters within the set. “This is our true homage to a typeface that had great potential more than three decades ago, but was overlooked by digitizers because of a few quirks it had in film type contexts,” they said.
Gaslon is curvaceous and robust, a jovial and friendly display font that, if we’re being totally honest, looks as though it gives great hugs. Big squishy ones — the kind you’d get from your closest friend or your favorite family member. It’s fun and imaginative, seamlessly blending its vintage roots with modern aesthetics.
Gaslon is exceedingly warm and affectionate, making it an especially great choice for children’s book covers, posters, welcoming storefront signage, product packaging, and any application that wants to share a good-natured message with the world.
Gaslon offers both contextual and stylistic alternates for greater flexibility, and its multilingual support extends to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, and Pan African Latin languages.
Canada Type currently offers 165 products through their portfolio on YouWorkForThem, but they’re always working on new projects so be sure to check back often so you won’t miss any future releases. Their library contains an incredibly diverse range of type designs so there’s something to suit just about every project you can imagine!
