The Galaxie family-of-families concept was born with a few specific designs in mind. The grotesque “Polaris” was the guiding light and first family released. As Polaris was being designed, sketches were made for an egyptian, a typewriter face, and a reconsidered Plantin. Copernicus is this last face.

I had always had a fondness for Plantin; it is such a workhorse typeface, more sturdy than graceful, with a nice wide stance, and quite different from other 16th-century type. I wanted to make a Plantin for the 21st century, reflecting the technology and aesthetics of today. I would not call it a revival, but a reconsideration of Plantin.

The Norwegian musician Rolf Lislevand has interesting thoughts in this vein: “For years people tried to play early music as closely as possible to the way it was played at its time of origin, but that’s a philosophical self-contradiction. The first question is whether it’s possible at all to replicate the performance of a musician who lived centuries ago. As far as I’m concerned, reconstruction is not really interesting at all. Do we really want to act as if we hadn’t heard any music between 1600 and the present day? I think that would be dishonest.”

So it is with Copernicus, which owes as much to the work of Gerard Unger, Matthew Carter and Christian Schwartz as it does to Robert Granjon (who cut the face for Christophe Plantin) or Frank Hinman Pierpont (who revived the design for Monotype 100 years ago).

The design started with the self-imposed constraints of the Galaxie system, where all types are meant to be used together. The internal dimensions of the typeface were set, so the task was to create from inside out. The work started in 2003, with very sporadic attention paid to the face.

In the summer of 2008, I shared the embryonic work with Kris Sowersby, and we decided that the project would be a perfect collaboration. We sent files back and forth from New York to Wellington for a few weeks, with Kris making the design come alive in ways I could never have predicted. Kris infused the font with his historical knowledge and unparalleled design skill and panache. This typeface is very much a collaboration, with each of us bringing our own viewpoint to the work. I could not be happier or more proud.

Version history
V1.0 – Initial release version; 2009.03

ISO 8859-1
Latin1
Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Danish, English (UK and US), Faroese, Galician, German, Icelandic, Irish (new orthography), Italian, Kurdish (The Kurdish Unified Alphabet), Latin (basic classical orthography), Leonese, Luxembourgish (basic classical orthography), Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk), Occitan, Portuguese (Portuguese and Brazilian), Rhaeto-Romanic, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Walloon

ISO 8859-2
Latin2
Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian (when in the Latin script), Slovak, Slovene, Upper Sorbian, and Lower Sorbian.

ISO 8859-3
Latin3
Esperanto, Maltese, Turkish

ISO 8859-4
Latin4
Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Greenlandic, Sami

ISO 8859-9
Latin5
Turkish

ISO 8859-10
Latin6
Nordic languages

Taste Test If you purchase a single weight (or more) of this typeface, then return later to buy the complete family, we will credit you the amount of the original sale.

Village End User License Agreement / Version 1.7, March 2010

This is an agreement between you, the purchaser, and Village. In accepting the terms of this agreement, you acknowledge understanding and promise to comply with its terms. If you do not accept the terms, please do not complete the purchase transaction.

What you are purchasing from Village is the license to use digital typeface software – hereafter “fonts” – on a certain number of computers within your organization; you are not purchasing the copyright to the design of the fonts, but the rights to use the fonts.

If you are purchasing 1 license, you may use the fonts on a maximum of 4 computers within your organization; If you are purchasing 2 licenses, you may use the fonts on a maximum of 10 computers within your organization; If you are purchasing 3 licenses, you may use the fonts on a maximum of 25 computers within your organization; If you are purchasing 4 licenses, you may use the fonts on a maximum of 50 computers within your organization; If you are purchasing 5 licenses, you may use the fonts on a maximum of 100 computers within your organization; If you are purchasing 10 licenses, you may use the fonts on a maximum of 500 computers within your organization; If you are purchasing 20 licenses, you may use the fonts on a maximum of 1,500 computers within your organization; If you are purchasing 30 licenses, you may use the fonts on a maximum of 5,000 computers within your organization; If you are purchasing 40 licenses, you may use the fonts on a maximum of 10,000 computers within your organization; If you are purchasing 50 licenses, you may use the fonts on an unlimited number of computers within your organization. You can purchase additional licenses at any time, which grant you the rights to use the fonts on additional computers, as noted above.

You may make archival copies of the fonts for your own purposes. You may not distribute the fonts to people outside of your organization. A copy of the fonts may be sent as part of a file release to a prepress bureau, if absolutely necessary. The fonts may be embedded in other documents, such as Portable Document Format (PDF) or Flash files (including sIFR), so long as the fonts are embedded in such a way that they can not be extracted. The fonts can not be embedded in Word or PowerPoint documents.

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We have done everything we can to produce our fonts to the highest and most up-to-date technical standards, and we test the fonts extensively in the latest versions of technically-compliant applications. If you do experience any difficulties with our fonts, we will work with you to resolve any technical issues in the fonts. If, after we have worked to resolve any technical issues, you are still not satisfied with our software, we will be pleased to refund your money, which shall be the limit of our liability in this transaction.

We grant the rights of use of our fonts to you in good faith, and request that you adhere to the terms of this agreement to the best of your ability, and in good faith.