Lincoln Electric started its life as an in-house experimental film type Thomas Lincoln drew shortly after concluding his work as part of Herb Lubalin’s famed crew in the late 1960s,. The master alphabet was drawn on illustration boards using pen and ink and press-type lines. The typeface was initially made for use in the branding and promotional material of Lincoln’s new design outfit.
This alphabet’s forms are a spin on Bifur, the all-cap deco face designed by Adolphe Mouron (known as Cassandre) in 1929, and published by the Deberny & Peignot foundry in France. Lincoln Electric evolves Cassandre’s idea further by constructing new shapes more in line with minimalist principles rather than art deco geometry — something clearly evident in Lincoln’s minuscules, which exhibit a clear connection to Bauhaus ideas
More than 50 years after the typeface’s design, Thomas Lincoln found the original film alphabet tucked away in his archives and brought it over to Canada Type for digital retooling. The result is a modern and thoroughly elaborate set of fonts that belonging prominently in a 21st century designer’s toolbox. The following features are included in Lincoln Electric:
• Three fonts for chromatic layering.
• More than 1900 glyphs in each font.
• Expanded Latin and Cyrillic character sets.
• Small caps and Caps-to-small-caps.
• Six different sets of stylistic alternates.
• Ordinals and case-sensitive forms.
For a showing of the stylistic set variations and a sample of demonstration of chromatic layering, please consult this PDF.