Cooper Italic Pro Font

1924 saw the release of Cooper Italic, the italic companion to Cooper Oldstyle. Cooper Italic possesses “a most unusual swing” in a number of the characters, most specifically the scooped, pigeon-toed feet of the lowercase “n”, “h”, and “m”. These idiosyncratic characters are offset by more stately and assured capitals. Cooper said that his Italic is “much closer to its parent pen form than the roman” and “that freedom is almost the life of it”.

Cooper was a firm believer in creating humanist letterforms that echo the hand that created them, not wringing the life out of them through refinement and mechanization. In Cooper’s own words about Cooper Italic, "The designer is conscious of its crudity, and of its irreverence for the best traditions. But he believes that there are enough good types already– that the need is for poor types that can be used! And since he admits this to be a poor one, there now remains to be found out only whether it is usable or not." Cooper was long a believer that good type should be homely- if too pretty or sleek, it’s lifespan would be exponentially shortened.

Cooper designed a set of swash capitals to pair with Cooper Italic in 1927 that had not been released until now. The swash capitals are a lively interpretation of round serifed oldstyle caps mixed with classic Caslon italic forms.

Cooper Italic Pro is the result of researching Cooper’s original drawings and series of engraved proofs for both typefaces. The typeface includes the original ligatures (never before released digitally), the previously unreleased Swash characters, small caps and a range of punctuation and diacritics, et al, that fill out a full character set. The typeface has been lovingly kerned for the smoothest result in text setting.

The Fonts provided on YouWorkForThem are designed to work on Macintosh and Windows systems. We also provide additional formats for website design (Web Fonts), along with eBook and Mobile App licensing options. All of the available formats for this font are listed in the Buying Options tab above. Enjoy lifetime access to all your font purchases with a single payment — Say goodbye to subscriptions.