Urge Text was designed by Dave Rowland and published by Schizotype. Urge Text contains 24 styles and family package options.
It started with an italic, or to be more precise, half an italic. The slanted styles of Urge Text exhibit a certain bipolarity, the tops of glyphs having a standard italic form, the bottoms of glyphs being more Roman in their construction. This sturdy footing really locks the italics to the baseline, making them very legible while still being distinct from the uprights. The same bipolar approach didn’t work very well in upright styles, so the Romans are more toned down.
Ranging from the almost monoline, Egyptian style light weights to higher contrast ‘Modern’ bolds, there is much potential for use in typographically demanding scenarios.
The family consists of six weights, normal and condensed widths, all with italics, making a total of 24 fonts; it’s a highly usable text typeface with an array of OpenType features.
All styles include small caps, multiple figure styles (proportional- and tabular-, oldstyle and lining, small cap proportional figures, numerators, denominators, superscript and subscript), standard ligatures, alternate forms (stylistic sets), automatic fractions, case sensitive forms, and a handy (perhaps!) ‘percent off’ ligature in the discretionary ligatures feature.
This is Schizotype’s most ambitious release to date, with great language support and mathematical symbols. Urge Text should prove to be a useful addition to your typographic arsenal.
