Sam Suliman

Sam Suliman is a condensed display face supplied in three weights – Regular, Medium and Bold – plus a set of handy italics (obliques). All six fonts are included in the collection.

The typeface is inspired by lowercase lettering on a Sarah Vaughan album cover designed by Sam Suliman in 1962, a style which contrasts sharp tight outer corners with soft rounded counters. The letters were perhaps influenced by a Solotype font called Herald Square, but without that font’s aversion to diagonals, and adding distinctive perky ascenders/descenders on the lowercase r, a, u, g and n. The Sam Suliman fonts also add the nubs to d, m, p, and q.

Suliman was born in Manchester, England in 1927. After working for McCann Erikson in London, he moved to New York where he took on freelance work designing album covers, particularly celebrated are his striking minimalist designs for jazz records. He moved back to England in the early 1960s, designing many book jackets, film titles and fabrics, also working in Spain and India before settling in Oxford in the 1980s.