AJ Quadrata is a blackletter typeface by Adam Jagosz, drawn after Textura Quadrata, the dense formal hand of late medieval manuscripts. The letterforms follow the writing in the Zwollen Bible of around 1490, where every stroke is set at the same steep pen angle and the page reads as an even, woven texture.
That texture is the point of the style. Verticals dominate, the counters are narrow, and each letter ends in the diamond-shaped feet a broad nib leaves behind, so words lock together into solid blocks rather than sitting as separate shapes. It is dark, formal and deliberately slow to read, which is exactly what it was for.
Use it for titles, book and album covers, certificates, packaging, tattoo and heraldic work, and anything reaching for a medieval or ecclesiastical register. Like all blackletter it belongs at display sizes; a paragraph set in it becomes a wall.
The font is unusually broad for the style. It carries the full Armenian alphabet, all 38 capitals and all 38 small letters, along with և, the full stop ։ and the question mark ՞, and it covers Latin, Cyrillic and Greek as well, running to roughly 1,900 glyphs with kerning and OpenType features. The dram sign ֏ is not included. The designer also draws companion styles, a more archaic Medieval version and a layer font called Rubrum for two-colour rubrication, which he provides on request.
Free for personal use. For commercial use, write to the designer at [email protected].
This unicode Lombardic font is available for Armenian and another 3 different keyboards in «Regular» weight and «normal» style.
