CAST Alfabeti Modernisti

Tirana is a condensed geometric sans with caps and lowercase. It is rich in colour, with a geometric flavour and sharp details. It has a large x-height, low contrast, and very open apertures. Some of the letterforms come from classic modernist lettering, such as the exceedingly open C and S, or the pointed A and N. However, the design is defined by its treatment of spurs and joints, which are either squared or closed at a sharp angle, and its lenticular and lemon-slice counters.

Tirana was a wood type cut by Xilografia Italiana, a company operating at Badia Polesine (Veneto region, between Verona and Rovigo), most likely between 1938 and 1941. It was released in several body sizes ranging from 4 to 30 lines (roughly 50 and 380 points), and Xilografia Italiana also sold a slanted version of Tirana under the name of Corsica. 

The two original designs have been reunited as a family: Corsica, with its dramatic 20º slant, lives on as AM Tirana’s italic. Regarding references and models, the designer Leo Philp says: ‘I haven’t seen anything with Tirana and Corsica’s crowd of features before. Some can be found in other typefaces: the spurless n, m, u in Dax and its successors, the sharp join of bowl and stem is echoed (much less severely) in Cyrus Highsmith’s Relay. I haven’t seen the sharp, lenticular counters in a sanserif typeface, but I have seen similar forms in letters cut into wood with a router.’

‘Many of my changes feel like necessary adjustments for a wood type’s translation into a digital font,’ remarks Philp of the AM Tirana digital revival. ‘I made optical corrections, the weight of upper and lowercase characters more consistent, and gently harmonised them and the shapes within them. Tirana’s terminals, sometimes oblique, sometimes sheared, were made more systematic, and some characters were redrawn.’

Most of AM Tirana’s OpenType features are derived from their wood type source. For tightly leaded all-caps settings, there are raised dashes, guillemets, @, and more compact parentheses. Stylistic sets preserve alternate characters originally available with the type: the large-countered 6 and 9 and the more conventional ‘closed’ C and G (to which a companion lowercase c has been added); the original ampersand has been kept. To these alternates have been added rounded variants of the u, m and w.

OpenType Features:

Case sensitive dashes, parentheses, guillemets and @
ss01 – Closing C, G, c
ss02 – Round bottomed u
ss03 – Rounded m, w
ss04 – Original alt 6, 9
ss05 – Original ampersand