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Mackay is a powerful transitional serif in 6 weights plus matching italics, designed for screen and print. The eccentric serifs on uppercase letters like E, F, L and T are inspired by Alexander Kay’s “Ronaldson” from 1884, working as the starting point for the family. The lowercase letters follow the traditional Antiqua model with attributes tracing back to drawings from the early 20th century.
The “grotesk” lowercase a, as well as the sharp lowercase s, derived from the closed shapes of uppercase letters like C, G or S, create a compact and bold appearance while a large x-height and small descenders add a modern look.
In favor of a dynamic and elegant impression, the design of the italic cuts come with a strong calligraphic influence. This results in completely new shapes for letters like lowercase a or g, ensuring a smooth integration into their surrounding letters while maintaining a distinctive appearance when combining with romans.
The family comes with a variety of opentype features like case sensitive shapes, old style figures, fractions, ordinals and many more. Additional attention was given to the standard and discretionary ligatures, extending the structure of the basic glyphs with elegantly designed letter combinations for g/i, i/t or s/t. According to their dynamic architecture, the italic weights are equipped with additional initial swash characters to subtle accentuate the calligraphic roots.
As a result of a high stroke contrast the family works great in paragraphs with medium to large font sizes like headlines, short paragraphs or logos. With its 12 cuts, the family meets all requirements on high quality typography.