Typographic design

Most projects involve some element of typeface design or extension. Over the years we have built up a collection of ovr 100 music typefaces, some enabling us to adapt to the house styles of particular clients, and some to the requirements of particular projects.

In addition we often need to add extra characters to text fonts designed elsewhere. This is typically to allow for figured bass or for unusual accented characters. With figured bass this is needed because the notation uses conventional numbers, and also crossed numbers and musical accidentals which do not appear in normal text fonts: the Silverfen solution to this is to add the extra characters, aiming to provide the figured bass characters that the text font would have, if it had these symbols.

The consequence is great flexibility: when we need symbols which we do not have, we simply create them. The only limit is our imagination...

A Chronista symbol, designed for use in a setting of the Matthew passion according to the use of Toledo Cathedral in the late sixteenth century, where it is used to indicate passages to be sung by the narrator of the gospel story.