“During the making of Letter Fountain,” Joep Pohlen, author of the aforementioned Letter Fountain, wrote in a recent email, “I found out that most of the metal typefaces were digitized since the nineties of the last century. As a fan of Roger Excoffon I bought some digital fonts of Calypso and discovered that they had not the quality I expected. We did some research on how Calypso actually had to look and we set off to draw our own version. Now we completed it and we supply it as a free download to the typographic community for Mac and Windows. We like the unconventional character of this typeface. It is highly redundant and the readability is bad. And yet it is wonderful like many other designs from Excoffon.” It can be downloaded here. In the download there is also a textile with some more information and references. Also look at “The making of Calypso PF” on YouTube.
The illustration above left: The original sample of the ‘C’ from the Calypso in 1960 in the yearbook Caractère Noël 60. Lower right: Pohlen’s version. The other two are existing digital fonts from 1997 and 2005. Above the 24 point metal type our version is based on.