Meno Banner Font

Richard Lipton first designed Meno in 1994 as a seven-style serif family. His 2016 expansion developed it into a larger system with Text, Display and Banner optical sizes. Lipton identifies late-sixteenth-century Robert Granjon types as an influence on the romans, with the italics drawing on Dirk Voskens in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Meno Banner belongs to this coordinated editorial system, rather than being an unrelated font that happens to share the Meno name.

Read the publisher’s family page for the source account and the edition currently offered. Keep a family name distinct from its particular release, width or optical branch.

The Banner branch is offered in normal, Condensed and Extra Condensed widths, each with weights running from Light through Black and corresponding italics. The foundry lists common and discretionary ligatures, lining and old-style numerals, stylistic sets and superscripts. Those choices make edition and width worth inspecting separately. The wider Meno system distinguishes optical sizes explicitly, so a Banner selection should not be confused with the Text drawing simply because both share a family ancestry.

Use the original publisher specimen to inspect those features. An alternative can share a broad role without having the same letter shapes, metrics or character coverage.

Build a magazine opener with one large title, a short introductory line and a body paragraph. Compare Banner widths at the same visible capital height, then adjust the line break before changing tracking. Put long reading copy in a text-oriented face so the heading can do the expressive work. For a useful proof, include an italic word, a publication date and an accented name, then inspect the entire title at its intended printed size.

For independent comparisons, try Playfair Display and Cormorant Garamond. Use the same wording and approximate output size. The related style guide provides broader design context.

Use Lipton Letter Design to try the original and investigate the files, styles and terms for your intended workflow. This site does not distribute or serve Meno Banner font software.

The editable alternatives here have their own source profiles and included licenses. For the difference between a font file and copied characters, read Unicode text versus fonts.