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National Trust (typeface)

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National Trust
CategorySans-serif
ClassificationHumanist
Designer(s)Paul Barnes

National Trust is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Paul Barnes for the National Trust of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.[1][2] It is a corporate font family and not available for licensing.[3]

The replica Stourhead inscription with its four-line epigram.

National Trust is based on an inscription dated around 1748 on the Stourhead estate, part-owned by the National Trust since 1946.[4] The inscription on which the font is based is an epigram, The Nymph of the Spring, in the grotto beside the lake where a statue of a nymph sleeps, and is in a mostly sans-serif style, one of the first such uses of the style since classical antiquity.

The unusual style of the inscription came to the attention of historians, most famously James Mosley, whose work The Nymph and the Grot on early sans-serif lettering is named after it.[5][6][a] Mosley has concluded that he cannot be certain of the source of the style and that it does not seem to have influenced successors, but that its unusual, simplified structure may be an "exercise in rusticity" related to the spirit of the construction, intended to imitate a natural cave.[5][8][9][10] As the inscription was destroyed by mistake in 1967, it had to be replicated from Mosley's photographs.[5][11]

Being based on the Stourhead inscription makes National Trust a "stressed" or "modulated" sans-serif, with a clear difference between horizontal and vertical stroke widths.[12] Other typefaces in this style include Optima (inspired by medieval inscriptions from Florence), Britannic and Radiant.[13]

The four line poem, translated into English from Latin by Alexander Pope, was attributed to an inscription on a legendary Roman fountain with a statue of a sleeping nymph above the River Danube.[9][14][15] The motif of a sleeping nymph besides a fountain was popular with Renaissance humanists and influential among neoclassical garden designers, but is now generally suspected to be a fifteenth-century forgery.[16] In English, it runs:

Nymph of the Grot, these sacred springs I keep
And to the murmur of these waters sleep
Ah spare my slumbers, gently tread the cave
And drink in silence, or in silence lave.[17][18]

References

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  1. ^ National Trust Brand Standards (PDF). National Trust. 2014. pp. 30–33.
  2. ^ "New look National Trust magazine rolls out". The Drum. Retrieved 23 September 2016.
  3. ^ "National Trust branding". Luke Charles. Retrieved 23 September 2016.
  4. ^ "The history of Stourhead". National Trust. Retrieved 24 September 2016.
  5. ^ a b c Mosley, James (1999). The Nymph and the Grot: the Revival of the Sanserif Letter. London: Friends of the St Bride Printing Library. pp. 1–19. ISBN 9780953520107.
  6. ^ John L Walters (2 September 2013). Fifty Typefaces That Changed the World: Design Museum Fifty. Octopus. pp. 1913–5. ISBN 978-1-84091-649-2.
  7. ^ Berry, John. "A Neo-Grotesque Heritage". Adobe Systems. Retrieved 15 October 2015.
  8. ^ "TYPO Berlin 2013: Paul Barnes". Creative Bloq. 19 May 2013. Retrieved 23 September 2016.
  9. ^ Mosley, James. "The Nymph and the Grot: an Update". Typefoundry blog. Retrieved 12 December 2015.
  10. ^ Barnes, Paul. "James Mosley: A Life in Objects". Eye. Retrieved 23 September 2016.
  11. ^ Lieberman, J. Ben (1978). Type and Typefaces (2d ed.). New Rochelle, N.Y.: Myriade Press. pp. 70, 119. ISBN 9780918142016.
  12. ^ Shaw, Paul. "About More Alphabets review". Blue Pencil letter design. Retrieved 23 November 2015.
  13. ^ Stephen John Campbell (2004). The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella D'Este. Yale University Press. pp. 95–6. ISBN 0-300-11753-1.
  14. ^ Maryan Wynn Ainsworth; Joshua P. Waterman, eds. (2013). German Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1350-1600. Metropolitan Museum of Art. pp. 95–6. ISBN 978-1-58839-487-3.
  15. ^ Jay A. Levenson; National Gallery of Art (U.S.) (1991). Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration. Yale University Press. p. 260. ISBN 978-0-300-05167-4.
  16. ^ Leonard Barkan (1999). Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. Yale University Press. pp. 237–8. ISBN 978-0-300-08911-0.
  17. ^ Richard Graves (1766). The Festoon: A Collection of Epigrams, Ancient and Modern. Panegyrical, Satyrical, Amorous, Moral, Humorous, Monumental. Robinson and Roberts. p. 108.
  1. ^ The name is a dual reference, also to "grotesque" being coincidentally a term also applied to early sans-serif fonts.[7]
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