Trinité
Credits
Background
In 1982 Bram de Does designed Trinité in response to a commission from Joh. Enschedé en Zonen. Initially the typeface was only made available for photocomposition on the (now obsolete) Autologic (analogue) phototypesetting system.
The Trinité family is remarkably extensive and complete. The diagram on this screen shows how the family is built up.
The vertical axis shows the main groups, differentiated by stem (ascender and descender) length. Versions 1 to 3 have different stem lengths (1 is short and 3 is long). The stems of Version 4 are the same length as version 3, but have swash stroke endings.
The horizontal axis shows the different weight variants (Roman, Medium and Bold), width variants (Wide and Condensed) and style variants (roman and Italic). The Italic is designed to complement the Roman Wide variant, as well as the Roman Condensed. Similarly the Medium Italic is designed to complement the Medium Wide and Medium Condensed variants.
All characters without ascenders or descenders (capitals, and numberals for example ) are identical across all 4 versions. This makes it possible to switch effortlessly from Roman Wide 1 to Roman Wide 2 or Roman Wide 3 without reflowing the text. Also, the ‘regular’ fonts (Roman Wide, Roman Condensed and Italic) have the same width as the corresponding medium variants (Medium Wide, Medium Condensed and Medium Italic) thus making it possible to switch from regular to medium weight without the problem of reflow.
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