Why doesn’t Cycles have bold and bold italic? I’d love to get it, but my books always require boldface somewhere, and of course for commercial work it’s utterly useless! I’ll NEVER understand how foundries can release a text family with half its nuclear members missing! What are you thinking, Mr. Stone?

>Why doesn’t Cycles have bold and bold italic?

Just checking, the nine and eleven sizes have a semi-bold.

Why doesn’t Cycles have bold and bold italic? What are you thinking, Mr. Stone?

Well, I’m sure Sumner Stone didn’t just forget about them. ;-)

For 2600 years of making and re-making, the breeding of the Roman letter has been under way … [from the introduction to the Cycles Specimen Book]

Though this passage actually is on optical sizes, I think it shows that Cycles is meant to be a book face in a very very classic sense. The idea of having bold weights (for serif text faces), in contrast, is quite young; in traditional book design there is/was no need for having a bold, let alone a bold italic.

I can understand that you miss those weights and find it utterly useless for commercial work. But then, maybe Cycles never was made for loud advertising? And there are myriads of comparable faces that offer that ‘modern’ R-I-B-BI-variety. You always require boldface? Go with those alteratives! I, for one, appreciate the idea of making a nice text family with 7 (!) optical sizes, all featuring italics, small-caps, lining and os figures … And I’d prefer it over just another ‘nuclear members’-quadrumvirate – with one or two members of such a ‘value pack’ gathering dust untapped.

Further reading: Where do bold typefaces come from?
There are also some interesting quotes in this thread, Why doesn’t Swift have a Bold Italic?:

Some designers don’t make a Bold-Italic as a form of functional romanticism, or you could call it capricious (or rebellious) anachronism. — Hrant H. Papazian

Bold is type on junk food. — Giampa the Great

As a type designer it’s hell to make the bold italic weight. — Stefan Hattenbach

Nobody?

Yeah, I agree with Paul. Small Caps and Italics are a great way to create emphasis in text, and combined with space and layout options, hierarchy as well. Sure, in some designs, bolds, etc. have their place. But they are not requirements, and I certainly find them far less important than, for example, air conditioning.

Nobody?

Florian said all that needs to be said.

...that’s why it’s so unjustified...adding a bold and bold italic does nothing to detract from the classical beauty of the face; it just gives the customer options he is entitled to have for the fancy price charged.

If you think that you’re entitled to more when you buy a typeface from Sumner Stone it must be because you’ve carved accolades to yourself into the back your teeth that you can stare at while your head is jammed up your colon.

>Nobody wants to live in a world without boldface any more than they want to live in a world without air conditioning!

And that, friends, is a boldfaced lie!

...that’s why it’s so unjustified...adding a bold and bold italic does nothing to detract from the classical beauty of the face...

Actually, no, I think at times it does indeed “detract from the classical beauty of the face”. By way of illustration, have a look at Alex Kazcun’s 1991 expansion of Rudolf Růžička’s Fairfield, which in part “delicately tilt[ed] it from a pre- to a postmodern design”, as noted by Bringhurst in his Elements (3.0, p. 227).

I have tried using Kazcun’s Fairfield, but it’s just not the same typeface. I suspect Cycles might also lose as much as it would gain were it to be expanded similarly.

Cycles is my favorite face for setting books. I’ve never missed the bold or bold italic styles, no more than I regret the same “deficiency” in other classic faces such as HF&J’s Requiem or the Carter & Cone version of Galliard. As others have stated, the optical sizes, italics, small caps and various formatting options afford more than enough opportunity for emphasis and contrast.

By the way, SFPL, the four-style version of Cycles that Sumner Stone created for the San Francisco Public Library, does indeed contain a beautiful bold style, but still no bold italic.

A quite untenable and out-of-date distinction...commercial work can be just as elegant as fine book design...I know; I do both. Mr. Stone did a bang-up job with the two bold weights and bold italics for Stone Serif...in fact, those bold italics look better than the bold romans. Truncating the offering like this just means he won’t get the market penetration Cycles really deserves...that’s why it’s so unjustified...adding a bold and bold italic does nothing to detract from the classical beauty of the roman text face; it just gives the customer options he is entitled to have for the fancy price charged. Ditto for Requiem, which would be used all over the place by now if the foundry had enough sense to complete the family. Josh Darden’s re-think of Fournier, Corundum, comes with three weights and full italics and he shows no hesitation at applying his VERY classic face to these helpful additional options. It’s just good business. Nobody wants to live in a world without boldface any more than they want to live in a world without air conditioning!

I’m a little confused by the font formats, e.g. with Cycles. Could somebody shed some light please?

As seen at the optional ordering page at myfonts.com (Quote: “If you would like to order individual fonts or download the fonts immediately on purchase, most of them are at myfonts.com”), you can’t choose Open Type OTF or Open Type TTF. But there are “Windows/Mac OS X TTF” and the PostScript versions of Mac or Windows.

When clicking at the “order” button at Stone Type Foundry it says nothing about the font format. Although there is a passage about open type features at the overview page you can’t choose a font format when continuing your order. So which one do you get?

tina, these types of questions are best directed at the foundry.

thanks William...the semibold could offer a tad more contrast (I’m reminded of Sabon bold), and anyway we still need semibold italic as well. So frustrating! I’ll never understand not properly equipping text families with a choice of well-contrasted weights! Stone Serif has three beautifully contrasted weights, so why can’t Cycles?

Reminder … last orders! ;°)

Aiye, I spent all my money on eBay ....