Featured Font – Dante
Every now and then, I’ll encounter a font that feels extremely fresh, modern, and “now” – then I’ll look it up and discover that it’s decades old. When I was first learning about type and design, Gill Sans and Peignot caught me off-guard that way. 
Recently, this happened to me again with Dante, a gorgeous text face that mixes modern elements with old-fashioned ones in interesting ways. Dante – which I’d expected was a fairly new, digitally designed font – was in fact designed for metal type in 1955.
Dante was used to set the text in Neal Stephenson’s latest book, Anathem. I just finished the book, and found it fantastic – not only did it introduce me to a lot of ideas and philosophies that were knew to me, but it also introduced me to a great typeface.
The roughly 3,000 pages of Stephenson’s last set of books, the Baroque Cycle, were set in Baskerville – a lovely typeface that roughly matched the historical period in which the books take place. 
But I’ve been noticing a lot of Baskerville in book design for the last few years, and I was happy for the change of pace Dante provided. The mixture of old and new in Dante is a thoughtful choice for the text – the world in which Anathem is set combines modern society with monastic life.
Overall, Dante’s blend of curves and angles works very nicely. The ae ligature, which gets a lot of use in Anathem, is perhaps the font’s most beautiful example of this. But in my mind, Dante’s greatest feature is the killer spiked serif on the top arm of the E and F. This prominent thorn is repeated – toned down and sometimes sideways – in many of the lowercase glyphs.
Some of Dante’s characters, like the g and R, feel a bit overly poetic compared to the rest of the font. Others, like the A and S, feel a little more mechanical. However, after reading almost 1000 pages set in Dante, I can’t even decide if I dislike this inconsistency or if I appreciate its quirkiness.
If I’d seen Dante before reading Anathem, I hadn’t noticed it. But I’m definitely going to keep my eyes peeled for it now. I can definitely think of a lot of perfect applications for it – even if none of them fit projects in my current pipeline. However, if I ever write a giant speculative fiction novel about monks and parallel worlds, at least I’ll have the right font for it.