Rustic is a family of serif fonts ideal for use private-press—style book design, or in restaurant menu design. It is inspired by Ehmcke-Rustika, a 1914 typeface of Fritz Helmuth Ehmcke’s. The Rustic family includes five weights, ranging from Regular through Heavy. The default numerals in each font are proportional lining figures, but oldstyle figures are available via an OpenType feature. Each font also includes several Stylistic Sets. The first offers an alternate lowercase ‘e’, with a rounder beak. The second, third, and fourth include glyph alternates that were common in German-language typesetting a century ago. Specifically, there is an ‘f’ with a descender, as well as an alternate ‘ß’, whose form matches the descending ‘f’ and the fonts’ long ‘s’ glyphs. There are also ‘ch’ and ‘ck’ ligatures, plus ligatures combining the long ‘s’ with ‘ch’, ‘ck’, and ‘t’. Finally, there are versions of ‘Ä’, ‘Å’, ‘Ö’, ‘Ü’, and ‘Ů’ with lowered diacritical marks. The fifth Stylistic Set includes a ‘g’ that is more like the form used in the original Ehmcke-Rustika. The sixth Stylistic Set has ‘tt’ and ‘tz’ ligatures. Rustic features very large capitals; they are the same height as the tops of the lowercase’s ascenders. The type design retains a number of calligraphic ‘artefacts’, which look as if they were written with a broad-pen. Nevertheless, the design of Rustic’s letterforms is a little too modelled for it to be a representation of actual calligraphic writing.
