Designer: Zuzana
LickoZuzana Licko's objective for Fairplex was to create a text face which would accomplish legibility by preventing contrast, especially in the Book weight. As an outcome of its low contrast, the Fairplex Book weight is somewhat similar to a sans serif, yet the small serifs preserve the acknowledgment of serif letterforms.
When developing the accompanying weights, the difficulty was to balance the contrast and stem weight with the serifs. To offer a thorough household, Licko desired the boldest weight to be rather heavy. This meant that the "Black" weight would require more contrast than the Book weight in order to prevent blocking. However harmonizing the serifs proved hard. The preliminary serif treatments she tried didn't withstand the robust character of the Black weight. Several months passed without much progress, and after that one night she attended a talk by Alastair Johnston on his book "Alphabets to Order," a survey of 19th century type specimens. Johnston pointed out that piece serifs (also called "Egyptians") are truly more of a variation on sans serifs than on serif designs. Simply put, slab serif type is more akin to sans-serif type with serifs included on than it is to a version of serif type. This stimulated the idea that the service to her serif problem for Fairplex Black might be a slab serif treatment. After all, the Book weight currently shared features of sans-serif types.
Shortly after this came the concept to angle the serifs. This was recommended by her partner, and was probably invoked from his years of subconscious assimilation of the S. F. Giants logo design while viewing baseball, and reinforced by a comparable serif treatment in John Downer's recent Council typeface style. The angled serifs included visual interest to the otherwise austere slab serifs.
The intermediate weights were then obtained by inserting the Book and Black, with the exception of numerous characters, such as the "n," which required specially created functions to prevent collisions of serifs, and to yield a pleasing weight balance. A variety of weights was inserted prior to selecting the Medium and Bold weights.
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