Occupant Fonts is happy to announce Dispatch 2 and Stainless 2, updated versions of two of our most popular typefaces. Cyrus Highsmith and Cem Eskinazi added new weights, italics, expanded the character sets, and adapted the designs to work as variable fonts. It’s a release that has been a long time coming.
Dispatch was one of Cyrus’ first major typeface families. It was originally published in 1999 by Font Bureau in just four basic weights and, encouraged by its success, Highsmith soon added additional compressed, condensed, and extended widths. Dispatch, along with designs like Sibylle Hagmann’s excellent Cholla, helped make slab serifs a standard part of editorial typographic palettes around the turn of the century.
Stainless made its debut in Señor Fútbol, a sports supplement of the Mexico daily newspaper, La Reforma. The sans version began when Cyrus started slicing off Dispatch’s heavy serifs, but it quickly evolved into its own independent design. Since then, Stainless has been used in newspapers, magazines, and brands throughout the world, and inspired other similar typefaces.
Like other recent releases from Occupant Fonts, Dispatch 2 and Stainless 2 are available as variable fonts in addition to the usual OpenType formats. The variable fonts contain axes for controlling width, weight, roman/italic, plus a custom axis for adjusting the x-height. The x-height axis makes available another layer of typographic fine tuning that can be especially useful when composing multi-script documents.
Read Cyrus’ reflections on updating Dispatch and his process in this article.