Monotype Introduces Cotford, A New Serif Typeface for the Digital Era

Designed to Take You Places, Cotford Is Soulful and Contemporary, Powered by Variable Technology With Endless Levels of Expression

Monotype introduced Cotford, a new typeface by Tom Foley and the Monotype Studio. Cotford is a celebration of shape, form, and attention to detail – a 21st-century serif design that meets 21st-century needs.

As digital branding has matured and evolved with changes in technology, companies are eager to embrace typography that is unique, human, and personal—but equally versatile and reliable. This is the context in which Cotford was conceived. The ambition was to design a contemporary serif typeface with the versatility and robustness that today’s designers and brands expect.

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“Cotford is something I have wanted to design since 2014. Looking back through my sketches since then, the idea kept resurfacing”

“Cotford is something I have wanted to design since 2014. Looking back through my sketches since then, the idea kept resurfacing,” said Foley, Creative Type Director at Monotype. “My aim was to take the warmth and originality of those sketches and craft them into a useful and unique typeface family.”

Cotford is at once layered with references to classic typeface designs and taps into current trends and future possibilities in font technology – a “pop serif” for the modern digital age. The typeface embodies quality, consistency, and efficient performance allowing creative professionals to find the perfect style for a wordmark, editorial layout, headline, user interface, animation, or responsive experience.

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“I designed most of Cotford during lockdown,” added Foley. “It became a form of escapism for me, something I could immerse myself in and transform the anxiety of what was happening around me into something productive. In this way it’s a deeply personal project.” The visuals produced to showcase the family were also developed in part by Foley, who captured scenes from his locality over the past year-and-a-half.

A variable-first typeface, Cotford provides thousands of options across Text and display styles, giving designers an exciting range of weights and optical sizes. Cotford is a creative asset meant to future-proof brands, thanks to variable technology, but its greatest appeal may be its simplicity. Its broad range of expressions in a relatively small family of static weights is ideal for brand implementation, ensuring a style that will always be unique, human, and personal.