Trilby
David Jonathan Ross · David Jonathan Ross
A reversed-stress slab drawn from the French Clarendon tradition, refined by David Jonathan Ross into a face genuinely usable at text sizes.
About
Where most reversed-stress faces are confined to headline work, Trilby's restrained take on the French Clarendon's backward weight distribution allows it to set full paragraphs with legibility intact. DJR stripped away the genre's usual showiness and applied the inverted stress to an open, contemporary letter structure, producing something that reads as quaint and characterful rather than theatrical. Four weights from Regular to Black, each with an italic, are complemented by variable font versions spanning the full weight range.
Classification
Trilby draws directly from the nineteenth-century French Clarendon tradition, defined by its reversed stress where horizontal strokes and serifs are heavier than the vertical stems. DJR retains this structural inversion while applying it to a more open, contemporary letterform, placing it firmly in the slab serif genre.