Tasman Black Italic

Originally published by OurType, Dan Milne’s Tasman has found a new home at Retype. Milne first conceived Tasman as a typeface for newspapers. This influenced the proportions and look of the face considerably: the goal was to keep the personality as warm and playful as possible without losing the credible tone required to deliver all kinds of news.

A sturdy, warm type family that is neither mechanical nor fragile. It borrows its name from Abel Janszoon Tasman (1603–1659), a Dutch seafarer, explorer, and merchant who mapped parts of Australia in 1642, including Van Diemen’s Land (now known as Tasmania).

Tasman’s primary purpose is an unbiased presentation of information; it strives for neutrality over elegance. Its characters are sturdy and unambiguous, sporting strong serifs, punctuation, and diacritics, as well as generously sized small caps and hybrid figures. Rationalized letterforms give the face enough robustness to withstand the stress of screen applications and laser printing. The figures’ three-quarter x-height makes them considerably larger than traditional oldstyle numerals, yet they still integrate with the lowercase much better than lining figures do.

Although initially intended for newspapers, Tasman’s somewhat corporate, objective appearance also makes it an excellent candidate for digital and print magazines, websites, annual reports, and corporate identities.

Tasman is a suite of feature-rich OpenType fonts fully equipped to tackle complex, professional typography. The character set includes small caps, fractions, case-sensitive forms, bullets, arrows, special quotes, and nine sets of numerals. Besides standard Latin, its extensive character set supports Central European, Baltic, and Turkish languages.