Design concept
Irma is a simple and elegant capital-only display typeface available in 9 weights. The typeface system provides various contextual letterforms allowing creation of typographic patterns. With the help of the sophisticated contextual substitution offered by OpenType technology, using these features is easier than ever before.
No overshoots & low accents
The round characters of Irma, such as O, C and G, have no overshoots (the degree to which the highest and lowest points exceed the flat baseline to achieve the optical effect of being the same size), which allows setting text with no space between the lines, as all letters are equally tall. When a special OpenType feature is applied (Stylistic Set 5), some accents above letters are lowered to eliminate space between the lines.
Text inversion
Another OpenType feature (Stylistic Set 2) allows automatic highlighting of text when no other font style or colour is available, simply inverting the text to negative forms.
Typographic Patterns
Inspired by the principles of the Arabic alphabet, Irma provides different conditional letterforms, depending on whether characters occur at the beginning, middle, or the end of the word. Letters can have four different forms (initial, medial, final and isolated). The choice of these forms is controlled by a powerful OpenType feature (Stylistic Set 1), which allows creation of typographic patterns using the negative spaces of the letterforms.
Discretionary ligatures
Irma includes over 200 discretionary ligatures to make the setting of text even more compact and unique.
Author
Irma was designed in 2009 by Peter Bilak.
