qué?

I thought that Q was going to be one of the difficult ones, and I've certainly not got any typeface that begins with Q in my own font collection. But that's the circumstance that makes me go out and do a bit of hunting, and that usually results in some nice surprises. Like Quadra 57, for instance:

I can't tell you very much about it, except that it was designed by Karl-Heinz Domning in 1974 for the H. Berthold AG Typefoundry, Berlin. And I can't tell you anything about Karl-Heinz Domning, either. Which is a shame. Because it's a rather fine font, in a butch kind of way, don't you think?

But I can tell you a bit more about David Quay (or at least let his website tell you for me). He designed Quay Sans in 1990:

According to Linotype, it's one of the precursors to the long run of functionalist European sans serif faces that has been a dominating force in type design since the 1990s, and is based on the proportions of 19th Century Grotesk faces. Grotesk, the German word for sans serif, defines an entire branch of the sans serif movement, which culminated in the 1950s with the design of  Helvetica.

ITC Quay Sans is made up of very simple, legible letters. The weights of the strokes throughout the alphabet vary very little. Microscopic flares on the ends of each terminal add a bit of dimension to the design. This helps prevent the onset of the monotony, a danger when one repeats countless near mono-weight stroked letters throughout a large body of text. ITC Quay Sans is a very readable face; it works equally well in all sizes.

Comments

[Bruno]

Quadra looks good and gives me another option when I want to use Rockwell. I like butch type...

[Noam Berg]

Don't forget about ff Quadraat! It's a great workhorse book face in the best of the Dutch tradition.

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontfont/ff-quadraat/