Columba
East of Rome · Lewis McGuffie · 2019
An old-style editorial serif by Lewis McGuffie, purpose-built for long-form reading in print and on screen, with optical sizes spanning 5pt to full text and full coverage of Latin, Cyrillic and Polytonic Greek.
About
Columba comes in two families, Text for 9pt and above and Micro for 5-8pt, each running through five weights with matching italics, giving 20 styles in total. Drawn with deliberately irregular stems to warm the reading texture, it won the 2019 Granshan Grand Prize for Non-Latin Scripts on the strength of its extended Cyrillic and Polytonic Greek coverage, which includes Vietnamese Latin. The family suits dense editorial environments such as footnotes, tight columns and reference matter where most serifs struggle at small sizes.
Classification
Columba is inspired by old-style types and polytonic bibles, with irregular stems and warm optical characteristics consistent with humanist old-style serif traditions, designed specifically for editorial text use across multiple scripts.