Fab

It’s 1984 and everything has sideburns. Shoulder-padded “dress for success” is in, with power suits for women, black and white layers for men, neon brights for the youngsters. Maggie’s “enemy within” and “no society” speeches preface the arrival of shopping malls and corporate status symbols. The economy is a philosophy and accountants carry ambiguous but very sophisticated-sounding titles. Thousands of words and expressions are reduced to initials or monosyllabic sounds. Synthesizers are very refined and the music is very catchy. The Macintosh and MTV are making waves. Brands are lifestyles. “Yuppy,” Yummy,” “Bobo,” “Dinky” and “Woopie” are standard consumer categories in advertising lingo. The Volkswagen identity, only 5 years old now, is all the rage in design. VAG Rundschrift, by all appearances a rounded and slightly condensed Futura, is everywhere. Tube design is king.

Fast forward two dozen years. Replay, but bigger and much louder. Fab. Let’s dance.

Fab is Canada Type’s tribute to the Eighties. It’s a five-font unicase family that brings tube design into the 21st century. The main font is an all-in-one treatment of the shiny roundness that the 1980s were. Fab White is a tightly packed thick outline font that conveys luscious contentedness like nothing else. The Fab Trio package is very useful for layered and colorful design, with the Black style serving as a backdrop, the Bold style as the front forms, and the Fill style for inlining.

Fab comes in all popular formats and contains support for Western, Central and Eastern European languages, as well as Baltic, Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish and Celtic/Welsh languages.