Old Standard TT

1827

The Old Standard Free Font Family is an attempt to revive a specific type of Modern (classicist) style of serif typefaces, very commonly used in various editions printed in the late 19th and early 20th century, but almost completely abandoned later. Although contemporary typographers often consider this lettertype obsolete and out-of-fashion, it still has at least two advantages:

-the classicist style still can be considered a good choice for typesetting scientific papers, especially on social and humanitarian sciences, as its specific features are closely associated in the people’s eyes with old books they learned on;

-the most beautiful examples of Greek and Cyrillic lettertypes were all based on the Modern style, so that for those scripts “Modern” fonts are much more appropriate than any contemporary (e. g. Times-based) designs.

That’s why the Old Standard font family has two main purposes: it is intended to be used as a specialized font for philologists (mainly classicists, germanists and slavists) and also as a general-purpose font for typesetting various editions in languages which use Greek or Cyrillic script. For this reason Old Standard provides glyphs for a wide range of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters.

The name “Old Standard” was selected as opposed to the “Obyknovennaya Novaya” (“New Standard”) typeface, widely used in the Soviet typography, which represents another, slightly different type of the same Modern style. The digital version of this font is now available from Paratype (http://www.paratype.ru). Of course this name doesn’t look very original, but it seems to be a good choice for a revival of the most common lettertype of the early 20th century.