Review: Laconic typeface is legible, lovely, and not to be taken lightly

Designer Robby Woodard of WoodardWorks describes Laconic as "a typeface design meant to be dry without quite seeming parched." For any stern note, Laconic is ideal: über-legible, even at small text sizes, but without friendly flourishes.

The glyphs are perfectly proportional (with 652 kerning pairs), and drawn with the preciseness of an almost typewritten font, but with sans serif twenty-first century style: Straight lines blend seemlessly into elegant curves with Laconic. Following good rules for a font like this, Laconic's lowercase letters have an x-height slightly taller than the median line, and uppercase letters like B, H, G, etc. aim their midpoints precisely at the median. Although Laconic's ascenders and descenders are uniformly short, the ascenders are slightly taller than the cap height.

If you are writing formal sentences (rather than all caps, or all lowercase) these far-reaching ascenders can be slightly distracting, so don't use Laconic for complex documents. The Laconic typeface family includes Light, Regular, Bold, and Shadow (all OpenType, and all included in the same download) for interesting, modernistic effects. Each weights feature small caps, proportional figures, old style figures, tabular figures, ligatures, and stylistic alternatives; as well as upper and lower case, numbers, and punctuation.

Embedding allows for print and preview only; but permissions in Laconic's EULA allow you to redistribute Laconic freely. Laconic is free for personal use; for commercial use contact Woodard.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.