Renaissance Antiqua
optimised over years
Cyrillic and Greek
6 Agmena
The Antiqua Agmena typeface, created by Jovica Veljović, has been designed to be the perfect book font. This typeface makes skilful use of proportion, form and spacing in the way that a practiced story-teller varies the timbre of his voice and deftly inserts longer pauses to bring his tale alive. You can read more about this fascinating typeface below. Agmena™ has no historical precursor; it was designed from scratch by Jovica Veljović with the aim to create a new book typeface. Althoughit generally has certain similarities with the group of Renaissance Old Style / Garalde typefaces, it is not directly derived from any of these. Clear and open forms, large counters and a relatively generous x-height ensure that Agmena is a highly legible design – even in small point sizes. The slightly tapering serifs and their curved connections to letter stems soften the rigidity of the typeface, bringing Agmena to life. This informal quality is further enhanced by numerous tiny variations to the letter shapes. For example, there are slight differences to the terminals of the “b”, the “d” and the “h” and minor dissimilarities in the forms and lengths of serifs of many of the letters. The tittles over the “i” and “j” and those of the German umlauts are almost circular, while the diamond shape that is more characteristic of a calligraphic script is used for the punctuation marks. Although many of these variations are only apparent on closer inspection, they are enough to give Agmena the feeling of a hand-made typeface. It is in the larger point sizes that this feature of Agmena comes particularly into play, and individual characters gain an almost sculptural quality. The italic variants of Agmena are true cursive typefaces, with various swash letters and additional ligatures enhance their calligraphic character. The narrower and more dynamically formed lower-case letters have a wider range of contrast in terms of line thickness, and the variations in their terminals give the impression of having been formed with a quill. The lowercase “a” takes a closed form, and the “f ” has a descender. The italic capitals, on the other hand, have been consciously conceived as a stabilising element, even though the way they have been inclined does not produce a mechanical effect. This visual convergence with the upright characters actually means that it is possible to use letters from both styles in combination. Agmena is available in four weights: Book, Regular, Semibold and Bold, each with a matching italic variant. Veljović designed the Book and Regular not only to provide an optical balance between various point sizes, such as those used for text and footnotes, but also to take account of different paper forms: Regular for lined paper and Book for publishing paper. Agmena comes with a comprehensive range of characters. All variants include small caps and various numeral sets with oldstyle and lining figures for setting proportional text and table columns. Thanks to its pan-European language support, Agmena can be used to set texts not only in languages that use the Latin alphabet, but also in Greek and languages that use Cyrillic characters. The standard set of ligatures has been extended to include special combinations for setting Greek and Serbian. In addition, Agmena includes some initial letters, alternative glyphs and ornaments. Agmena is a poetic text font with forms and spacing that have been optimised over years of work to provide a typeface that is ideal for setting books. But its letters also cut a good figure in the larger font sizes thanks to their individual, vibrant and, in some cases, sculptural effects. Its robust forms are not merely suited to a printed environment, but are also at home on computer screens, as web fonts.
Set in REGULAR 10/12 pt