Felbridge

The highly legible, sans serif typeface Felbridge® might share much in common with other sans serif designs, but dig deeper and you will see differences – particularly with the italics. While most sans serif designs base their italics on the “sloped roman” principle, the Felbridge italics are lighter, feature distinctive "hooked" strokes and are therefore noticeably distinct when contrasted with the other Felbridge weights.

History

The Felbridge design was developed as a useful on-screen font for use in web pages and across all electronic media. Designer Robin Nicholas wanted a strong, clear sans serif design that performed well in low resolution environments. The design turned out to also be extremely useful in printed media as well.

Updating the font in 2001, Nicholas made subtle improvements, such as adjusting certain character strokes to improve legibility by preventing pixels from bunching up in places. Other characters that had round strokes were given slightly squared proportions in order to fill them out. Small serifs were added to characters like the I, j and l. the resulting typeface not only excels in legibility, but retains a humanist feel regardless of the point size.

Felbridge Usage

All four Felbridge weights, Light, Regular, Bold and Extra Bold, include complementary italics. The Felbridge design was imbued not only with legibility, but versatility as well. It works well in both body text and headline work, in advertising or product branding. Within corporate identity programs, the Felbridge design is highly effective – and surprisingly distinctive.