Colonial Press is a font based on serif typefaces designed by William Caslon I (1692-1766) and various revivals thereof. Caslon is cited to be the first original typeface of English origin, but some type historians point out the close similarity of Caslon’s design to the Dutch Fell types, presumed to be the work of Dutch punchcutter Dirck Voskens.

Colonial Press harkens to the look and feel of newspapers in Colonial North America around the mid 1700s without the rough edges commonly associated with colonial printing and many reconstructions. The rough quality of the American typeface is believed to be the result of oxidation from the exposure to seawater during the long voyage from England to the Americas. Colonial Press is a heavy font that retains some of the handcut quality of these fonts while smoothing out the irregularities that make many of these fonts so visually distracting at larger point sizes.

For the italic version of this font, I chose to emulate the more ornate letterforms that I have encountered, giving the italic characters a more ornamental feel.

Colonial Press comes with full punctuation and a 362 glyph character set for most Western European-based Latin alphabet languages. It is a font that is designed both for normal typing and for larger, decorative display.