A Note on the Type: Constantia

Jack Cooper and I love type and we've decided to share that love with you by posting excerpts from the colophons we have written about the typefaces we use in our books. Here's the first installment about Constantia, written by Jack Cooper.

Designed by John Hudson, a multilingual specialist in the depiction of scripts ancient, exotic, and arcane (Ogham, Sinhalese, and Cherokee, for example), Constantia achieves benchmark fluency for continuous text, the lingua franca of contract lawyers. One of six typefaces created in conjunction with Microsoft’s ClearType text-rendering technology (and the initial letter “C”), Constantia, released in 1983, takes its name from Latin, meaning “constancy.” At odds with company lawyers whose fear of trademark infringement continued to narrow the choices of possible nomenclature, Hudson, one evening, singing psalms during vespers, heard “constantia” intoned. He later confessed that the sight of seabirds had made him regret that he hadn’t chosen to call the typeface Cormorant.