Silentium

Based on 10th century Carolingian minuscule scripts, Silentium captures the subtle energy and surprising versatility of this courtly manuscript form. As a multi-featured OpenType family, Silentium Pro includes a myriad of alternate forms, ligatures, and titling characters that add an air of tasteful liveliness to contemporary graphic design and typography. It is designed for use at display sizes, and will also work well in text setting as small as 8 points.

Silentium is the Latin word for silence, a discipline commonly practiced in the medieval European monasteries and court scriptoria where the Carolingian script flourished. For scribal monks, who produced some of the most beautiful manuscripts of all time, silence was an ascetic discipline that complemented their refinement of the written symbols of language. Now, more than ten centuries later, Silentium Pro brings the fluid energy of their work to contemporary design and typography. Silentium sparkles, with a quiet but ebullient sense of the human hand.

The Carolingian period is seen as an aesthetic high point by both scholars and practitioners of what we now call roman bookhands and type design. Though the Carolingian minuscule has served as the basis for other contemporary type designs, Silentium Pro is Veljović’s unique interpretation. It captures the energy and legibility of the original manuscripts in a useful, contemporary type design. The lowercase forms for Silentium Pro draw directly on the Carolingian minuscule found in 9th and 10th century manuscripts from the High Period. Because there was no rigid system of a dual alphabet (capital letters stylistically matching lowercase) during this period, the capital forms in Silentium Pro are from Veljović’s own calligraphic work, as well as being inspired by the titles, chapter openings, and initial capital letters in Carolingian manuscripts.

– Text written by Linnea Lundquist