Sirba, a seriffed typeface family with a friendly personality, was conceived especially for the demands in complex text environments like dictionaries, academic texts annual reports, novels and magazines. It has many design features that were particularly designed with Sirba’s purpose in mind. Because of its open counters, the large x-height, short ascenders and descenders, this typeface conveys a pleasant reading experience and high legibility even in small sizes. Sirba is a low-contrast typeface, contemporary but with a classical touch, revealing its beauty in design details, such as the asymmetrical bottom serifs, curved bracketing and calligraphically reminiscent terminals. Furthermore the capitals appear integrated into the text, thanks to the low cap height and the constant width of all tabular numbers between the weights make this typeface very usable in annual reports and tables. Sirba is available in the four classic styles plus a special heavy (Black) version, which is particular in that its proportions are designed so the counters remain big enough when set in very small text sizes. This means that Sirba Black’s spacing and letter width are rather generous in comparison to other typefaces of that colour. This ensure excellent legibility. During the design of the typeface family much attention was given to the italic and regular as counterparts of each other. The italic distinguishes itself just enough while reading without creating strange spots within the text when looking at the text as a whole. Sirba CYR’s character set covers over 80 languages that use the Latin, Cyrillic script plus Polytonic Greek and a full set of phonetic symbols. It also includes many typographical niceties, such as a set of arrows, ornaments, extended ligatures, small caps, 5 sets of numerals and more. Intensive study of typefaces from the period of letterpress printing used in bibles and dictionaries, in particular for small type sizes, and the understanding of the typefaces’ “secrets”, influenced the design and concept of Sirba to a great extend. The typeface was designed by Nicolien van der Keur in 2010.
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