Published on Friday, June 29th, 2012 by Peter Giffen

From Nova Scotia type designer and Applied Arts columnist Rod McDonald:

We don’t often get to tie type in with a national holiday like Canada Day. But this year Canada Type, a font development studio based in Toronto, has chosen the Canada Day weekend to announce that it has acquired the Rimmer Type Foundry (RTF) from P22 Type Foundry. The RTF library contains the complete body of work of Canadian design icon Jim Rimmer FGDC (1934–2010), who was an enormous influence on Canadian type design and private press printing, and the subject of Richard Kegler’s 2011 documentary, Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century. The RTF library contains many popular font families, such as Albertan, Amethyst, Credo, Dokument and Stern, the only typeface in the world ever to have been made available simultaneously in both hand set metal and digital formats.

Rimmer’s faces will be remastered and expanded by Canada Type, then re-released to the public, starting in the fall of 2012. Many of Jim’s previously unpublished typeface drawings will also be produced digitally and made available alongside his remastered and expanded existing faces.

Once Jim’s designs are re-released, a portion of their sales will be donated to fund the Canada Type Scholarship, an award that will be given annually to design students in Canada. This will be done in conjunction with the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC), the national professional association that awarded Jim Rimmer with the prestigious GDC Fellowship in 2007.

OK, that is more or less what the official press release will say. What it won’t say is just how committed Canada Type owner Patrick Griffin has been in seeing these typefaces brought back to Canada. Or how much work he has already invested to ensure that Rimmer’s faces are brought up to international standards. Jim was a wonderful man, and artist, but he wasn’t always concerned with meeting the strict standards that people expect from digital typefaces today. Jim’s typefaces were part of his art; that’s why they are so special. Now with the high-quality engineering that Canada Type will bring to his work a lot more people will get to use these wonderful typefaces.

I was friends with Jim for more than 30 years and in all that time I was never able to over come the envy I felt when I saw his work. Now Canada Type has ensured that I may never be able to get over it.

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