Jarlath

Though it had only a limited release as dry transfer type in 1974, Jarlath Hayes’s Tuam Uncial is an icon of Irish Modernism. Its design was based on hacked Helvetica Bold; Hayes sliced off the tops and bottoms of the letters to produce forms reminiscent of the wide, pen-formed scripts of old Insular texts. This digital revival, produced by Signal under the supervision of Jarlath Hayes's daughter Susan Waine, will support over 150 languages and include ligatures, directional arrows, and a fuller range of punctuation. To improve readability, we’ve tempered the extreme squarishness of the original forms, reduced their contrast, and provided more generous letterspacing. The early drafts of the original Tuam Uncial lacked the published version’s semiserifs, and Waine asked us to consider adding a sans version, now in production.