Scotch Modern is Nick Shinn's revival of the typeface used in the book New York State Cabinet of Natural History.
This beautiful genre of type, so popular in books, magazines and advertisements during the Victorian era and much of the 20th century, was derided by advocates of both the Arts & Crafts movement and 20th century modernists, and has never been properly adapted to hot metal, phototype, or digital media... until now.
Now the full range of typographic expression is possible in this style. The Scotch Modern OpenType Pro fonts, part of ShinnType's Modern Suite type series, support Western and CE encodings, Cyrillic (with Bulgarian alternates) and Polytonic Greek. There are many special features, including small caps, unicase, italic swash capitals, ten sets of figures per font, and both slashed and nut (vertical) fractions. The full Scotch Modern font family includes 5 standard Scotch Modern styles and 4 Scotch Micro font styles which are slightly heavier, have larger x heights and shorter descenders. Recontextualizing the 10-point type of a scientific report published in 1870, Nick Shinn has produced sleekly refined, micro-detailed vector drawings by eye, without the assistance of scans, thus presenting an ironic critique of the way in which mechanical imagery beguiles us with the trite veracity of simulacra.
Together with Figgins Sans, comprises The Modern Suite of matched fonts. Download the beautifully detailed 5MB Modern Suite PDF specimen. The Scotch Modern 5 style font family (without Micro styles) can be bought separately here. The Scotch Micro family (4 font styles) can be bought on its own here. To test, buy and download Scotch Modern single fonts in OpenType Pro (OTF/CFF format) click on the individual fonts listed below:
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