Fonts > Bifur font family from International House of Fonts
About Bifur
Bifur was originally designed by poster artist A.M. Cassandre. This "Art Deco" type design was issued by the French foundry Deberny & Peignot in 1929. Even upon it's original release and promotion, suggestions on how not to use Bifur were presented. As with most highly decorative display faces, the use should be selective and used sparingly. Of course the layout of "THIS IS NOT THE WAY TO USE BIFUR" in repeated paragraph form has become a famous design and appears in many surveys of design history.
Bifur (abbreviation of Bifurcation: a division into two parts) was originally designed as a single font (cut in several sizes with the number of parallel lines increasing as the point size increased) and also as a two-part font that could be printed in two solid colors. Cassandre only designed the upper case characters, numbers and basic punctuation. The "bifurcation" occurs with the bold "keyline" being the most basic recognizable element in the Letter ( Z and N being simply a diagonal line) and the secondary part being a solid shape or a tone created with the parallel lines). It was fairly popular (although not a financial success) and often imitated for display lettering. Occasionally these imitations made some innovations but mostly they were poor substitutes. One imitator attempted a lower case. This was used as a starting point for the P22 version which adds a lower case while keeping the upper case and all original characters true to the original Cassandre design.
Design Tip:
When using the two part Bifur fonts (P22 Bifur C along with either D,E or F), the best way to start is typing your text using a fully legible font (or A or B). The two part fonts can be done in any page layout program that supports layering (Illustrator, Freehand, Photoshop, Corel Draw).
After typing your text, select one of the Bifur fonts and arrange the size and layout as desired. If you set up horizontal and vertical guidelines, you can move the text box to "snap" into a corner. You can then copy the text box and change the Bifur font to it's companion font. If you drag the second text box to the same guidelines, the two should be aligned perfectly one on top of the other. If the wrong one is on top then send it to the back. You can then group the two text boxes and move them together to the prefered area of your design.
Results may vary for various printers. 300dpi or 600 dpi printers may cause the tight parallel lines to appear irregular at smaller point sizes. Onscreen rendering of the parallel lines will be irregular at smaller sizes. Bifur should not be used at lower than 48 points for any purpose. EVER.
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There are 4 available in this family.
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