Stornoway
Arcane Type Foundry · Alanna Munro · 2024
A high-contrast sans by Alanna Munro that translates the sturdy elegance of Scotch Roman into a serifless form with flared terminals, true italics and a variable axis controlling both weight and contrast.
About
Inspired by Scotch Roman faces and Dwiggins' Caledonia, Stornoway strips away the serifs while keeping the pronounced stroke contrast, flared terminals and raised x-height that define that tradition. The family divides into two subfamilies: the standard high-contrast cuts suited to display work and the Low variants with reduced contrast for body text and packaging. Seven weights from ExLight to Chonky run across both subfamilies with matching true italics, and a variable font exposes weight and contrast axes independently, with a reverse-contrast expansion planned.
Classification
Stornoway is a serifless sans with dramatically high stroke contrast and flared terminals, drawing formal inspiration from Scotch Roman and Dwiggins' Caledonia while remaining strictly a sans. Its structure sits closer to a display serif tradition rephrased without serifs than to a conventional grotesque or humanist sans.