About Rimmer Type Foundry
It is a rare typographic craftsman who is fully at ease cutting metal typefaces by hand and working the same designs with Bezier Curves on a Macintosh computer. Jim Rimmer is this craftsman and more. He has designed typefaces for his own books that he designs, Illustrates, prints and occasionally writes himself. P22 is proud to be the exclusive outlet for Mr. Rimmer's digital fonts. Over 200 digital faces have been made including the imposing 90 font "Dokument" family. Digital faces such as
Albertan Oldstyle,
Alexander Quill,
Fellowship and
Lancelot all have metal counterparts which are proprietary fonts found at Jim's Pie Tree Press in Vancouver. Other faces such as
Zigarre Script,
Poster Paint,
Cotillion &
Amethyst are designs made exclusively for digital use. Jim Rimmer also made the digital versions of the
Cloister,
Deepdene &
Garamont fonts for the
Lanston Type Company in addition to being the Lanston Type Director during its time in Vancouver.
About Jim Rimmer
Jim Rimmer is enjoying his fifty fourth year in the pursuit of typography. His background covers a bit of ground: from some years in hot metal type in the composing room, and in the operation of the linotype and the Monotype, of which he still has a large and active collection of differing machine models. He is still designing and cutting faces in metal in concert with those that he is designing for digital format. In 2000 and 2001 he completed two hot metal faces and has recently finished a third; Hannibal Oldstyle for the printing of the book: Tom Sawyer in 2006.
His experience in graphic design covers 40+ years, encompassing positions in advertising agencies and design studios. For more than 25 years he has had the good fortune to experience the mixed blessings of freelancing as a letterer, designer, and illustrator.
Rimmer Type Foundry is the gathering of Jim's metal type founding knowledge and hand skills with his many years as a lettering artist into something useable in the digital font world. The mechanical aspects of metal type; its dimensions, side-bearings and point designations blend hand-in-glove with the metrics or parameters of the digital letterform. The foundry leans in the direction of traditional type forms but does address the need to offer more contemporary type styles. Type outlines originated as careful renderings in Ikarus directly from hand-drawn pencil art. The new 2006 releases of the Rimmer digital fonts are offered in TrueType, PostScript and now Opentype for the widest range of possible usage.
Jim Rimmer says of this collection:
"Even after working with letters in a number of forms, for so many years, it has been a surprise to me just how much work it has taken to produce even a modest selection of typefaces as those offered in this catalogue. I have enjoyed the entire process, which to me was a new one, even though I became involved with a local font company in the very early days of computer type in Vancouver. What makes this a new adventure, aside from the realization that I needed to become literate in the mysteries of the little beige box, is that these were to be my typefaces, with the results dependent on me, regarding the finish of the type outlines.
I am happy to be able to offer faces that are as new as a few months, and some that have slept in my flat file for a couple of decades or more. The Credo family of types is my first serious and complete attempt at a sans face. Albertan, in this form, is how I intended it to look when I first hand-engraved it as a letterpress type for my private press in 1980. I hope that you will find something you like, and can use in this selection. I had a great time doing them, and there are more to come."