Sentinel
How to use
Sentinel
Unbound by the traditional limitations of the Antique and Clarendon styles, Sentinel is a fresh take on a familiar and practical typographic genre. A well-rounded family with clear and expressive gestures, the self-possessed Sentinel is practical at small sizes and engaging at large ones.
The Sentinel family contains six weights from Light to Black, each provided in roman, italic, and roman small caps. Sentinel maintains visually consistent intervals between its weights, to ensure that every style has a heavier counterpart that provides the same degree of emphasis.
For every weight of Sentinel, the style that’s three steps heavier has sufficient visual contrast to serve as a boldface:
Sentinel ScreenSmart is designed for on-screen text. To emphasize any of its styles, use the weight that’s three steps heavier:
Use Sentinel’s italics to distinguish text without changing its weight:
For more contrast, use the small caps:
Sentinel is suited to use at sizes large and small. In text, the contrast between its thick and thin strokes helps to keep its counters open, alleviating the kind of congestion that often bedevils slab serifs in their heavier weights. In letters like the roman n, and throughout the italic lowercase, deep branching where curves and stems meet helps give Sentinel’s letterforms explicit silhouettes, which are distinctive at large sizes and clear at small ones. Its short descenders allow Sentinel to set comfortably with tight leading.
The following tables offer some conservative guidelines for the smallest sizes at which the fonts can comfortably be reproduced and read, assuming typical reading conditions, and conventional contrast between type and background colors. The recommendations for sizes on screen are based on the coarser resolutions of older, entry-level monitors: at the higher resolutions available on modern phones, tablets, and laptops, type is viable at even smaller sizes.
For digital applications, Sentinel ScreenSmart is an adaptation specifically designed for use on screen at text sizes, and engineered to deliver superior rendering in web browsers.
Text/Headlines
Ornaments
ScreenSmart® (SSm) fonts, designed for web and mobile applications, are engineered to work on screen at text sizes.
Text
Text
Sentinel has five types of numbers: short-ranging and lining figures for text, tabular figures for setting numbers in columns, fractions and fraction parts, and superscripts and subscripts.
Sentinel has features that make it easier to use tabular figures when designing data-heavy applications such as charts, tables, menus, and reports, as well as digital experiences that show dynamic data such as prices, statistics, product numbers, timetables, account numbers, points, or scores.
Sentinel uses Stylistic Sets, an OpenType feature available in many applications that makes it easier to apply related substitutions together.
5.1Stylistic Sets
5.2Additional Characters
Sentinel includes two fonts of ornaments — Bright and Dark — whose 250 decorative pieces are designed to lock together to create an infinite number of ornamental dashes, borders, and patterns. These fonts are included in both the Sentinel Ornaments and Sentinel Pro packages.
6.1Long Dashes
To create the 125 ornaments in the Sentinel Bright Ornaments typeface, we dissected a set of Aesthetic Movement printers’ dashes into modular parts, and invented six dozen additional pieces in a sympathetic style. All balanced around a common central axis, these ornaments can be chained together in any combination, to create decorative dashes of any length, and infinite variety.
6.2Short Dashes
While long sequences of Sentinel’s Bright Ornaments can be assembled into decorative rules, shorter runs can serve as section dividers, headpieces, and tailpieces. An abundance of symmetrical ornaments — along with directional ornaments in different orientations — makes it easy to create well-balanced decorative material with either a tapering profile or a rectangular silhouette.
6.3Effervescent Dashes
More than forty of Sentinel’s Bright Ornaments feature stars, bursts, or flowers that evoke more of a pop sensibility. Varying the mix of traditional and modern parts can shift the tone in subtle increments, and give the decoration an unexpected sympathy with even the unlikeliest of companions — from newsy condensed faces to industrial sans serifs.
6.4Flourishes
Short ornamental bursts can provide useful lampposts for readers, from the flourish that signals the start of a chapter, to the slug that marks an article’s end. Because the widths of Sentinel’s Bright Ornaments vary so wildly — the font’s longest shape is thirty-six times the size of its narrowest — small flourishes of any texture can be created with ease. Use a single wide ornament to introduce a contemplative pause, or a cluster of more animated shapes to enliven the text.
6.5Ribbons and Runners
Sentinel’s Bright Ornaments can be used not only to create tapering dashes, but also continuous running patterns. The font’s collection of varied but sympathetic shapes — simple and complex, narrow and wide, symmetrical and directional — invites almost any kind of typographic rhythm.
6.6Brass Dashes
‘Brass dashes’ have long been a fixture of the composing room, a simple and effective way to add an understated flourish to an otherwise spartan page. Sentinel’s Dark Ornaments distill the genre down to a set of interlocking pieces, designed to flow together into integrated shapes of any length.
6.7Starred Dashes
Alternating between the solid and starry shapes in Sentinel’s Dark Ornaments can create a more sparkling effect. A narrow-width space character makes it easy to give dense shapes the same staccato rhythm as the font’s stars and flowers: try adding spaces between solid ornaments that would otherwise touch.
6.8Perforated Dashes
Many of the shapes in Sentinel’s Dark Ornaments are made from discrete parts that swell in size. Mixing these with the font’s denser ornaments, and dividing things into distinct phrases using the space character, helps to create unexpected and engaging syncopations.
6.9Combination Dashes
Using the full range of characters in Sentinel’s Dark Ornaments — its solid, swelling, geometric, floral, abstract, representational, symmetrical, and directional ornaments — creates a warm and inviting air of eclecticism.
6.10Finials
Because the well-defined contours of Sentinel’s Dark Ornaments are clear at very small sizes, short ornamental bursts like these are useful for punctuating text. These shapes’ distinct profiles are equally practical at larger sizes, especially when screened back to create background textures for book covers or product packaging.
6.11Friezes
Their bold geometries give the shapes of Sentinel’s Dark Ornaments an architectural quality that evokes pressed moulding or plaster relief. Use symmetrical sequences of weight-balanced shapes to achieve a steady rhythm, or consistently directional ornaments for a buzzier tone.
Sentinel automatically adjusts spacing and character choices to improve typography.
7.1Ligatures
Collisions with the lowercase f are resolved by ligatures that are automatically substituted for the combinations fb, ff, fh, fi, fj, fk, fl, ffb, ffh, ffi, ffj, ffk, and ffl.
When letterspacing the lowercase, ligatures should be disabled.
7.2Smart Fractions
When fractions are turned on, Sentinel will automatically detect hyphens and slashes between numbers, and substitute a whole number followed by a fraction. The feature automatically excludes dates that use multiple slashes or hyphens, as well as expressions that use letters adjacent to the slash.
When slashes between numbers are intended, the fraction feature can be disabled.
7.3Fist Substitution
When an em dash is used with a less-than or greater-than symbol to construct a makeshift arrow (<—, —>), Sentinel will substitute a printer’s fist. Sentinel includes an alternate pair of fists, drawn as solid shapes, which can be chosen from the glyph palette, or introduced automatically by activating Stylistic Set 3.
7.4Kerning
Sentinel is spaced and kerned to perform in most circumstances without the need for manual intervention. In applications that offer multiple options for kerning type, always use the default kerning that’s native to the typefaces (labeled auto in Illustrator, and metrics in InDesign) — never use the setting for optical kerning.
So-called ‘optical kerning’ was originally developed as an automated assist for fonts that lack kerning. But applied to a professional typeface, it overrides the visual decisions made by the font’s designers, and instead spaces characters using a mathematical model. It routinely misjudges common pairs and ignores important context, and misaligns tabular figures, creating erratic and disruptive rhythms. Because its algorithms are subject to change with each software update, ‘optical kerning’ can cause text to be reflowed without notice.
Sentinel comes in two different editions: a Basic edition containing the core character set, and a Pro edition that features the comprehensive character set designed for professional typographers.
Letters
Numbers
Punctuation
Ornaments
Sentinel features H&Co’s Expanded Latin character set.
Sentinel supports 503 languages including Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Basque, Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Cebuano, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Frisian, Friulian, Galician, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Kurdish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgeois, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, Scots Gaelic, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Welsh, and Zulu.
