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About
Description

Suburban was VanderLans’ first attempt at the design of a complete typeface. The basic character ideas were sketched out by hand and then digitally redrawn and completed by Zuzana Licko.

Like many designers who design their first font, VanderLans’ goal was to incorporate into one design all of those components from other typefaces that the designer always admired. This led to a cross between Futura and the vernacular scripts you might find on the jersey of your local softball team. The final typeface, therefore, is a combination of fairly rational, geometric shapes sprinkled throughout with whimsical and calligraphy-inspired letterforms.

Designing Suburban also functioned as catharsis, an opportunity that allowed VanderLans to disprove (at least to himself) some of the basic notions he had learned in art school regarding traditional type design. Suburban would be considered a “vermicelli” font, a typeface lacking the necessary visible contrast and stresses between counters and strokes and/or optical corrections to make it a useful typeface. All valid notions, if your goal is to attain the highest level of legibility, but by no means the only route to making type that communicates.

As it becomes increasingly difficult to create original typeface designs, VanderLans is proud to report that Suburban can lay claim to being the only typeface in existence today that uses an upside down lower case “l” as a “y.” Creativity knows no bounds.

Type Designer

Emigre

Emigre Fonts is a digital type foundry and publisher of type specimens and artist books based in Berkeley, California. From 1984 until 2005 Emigre published the legendary Emigre magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to visual communication. The Emigre font library features more than 600 original typefaces, including Mrs Eaves, Brothers, Matrix and Filosofia.

Licensing Information
The full Adobe Fonts library is cleared for both personal and commercial use.

As with everything from Adobe Fonts, you can use these fonts for:

Design Projects

Create images or vector artwork, including logos

Website Publishing

Create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website

PDFs

Embed fonts in PDFs for viewing and printing

Video and Broadcast

Use fonts to create in-house or commercial video content

And more…

Visit the Adobe Fonts Licensing  FAQ for full details

Visit Emigre to purchase additional licensing and services, including:
Mobile Apps: Embed fonts in your app UI
Self Hosting: Host web font files on your own server
Custom Services: Request modifications or bespoke fonts directly from the foundry
Volume licensing: Use the fonts across your whole organization
Select font style

How to Use

You may encounter slight variations in the name of this font, depending on where you use it. Here’s what to look for.

Desktop

In application font menus, this font will display:

{{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.preferred_family_name}} {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.preferred_subfamily_name}}

Web

To use this font on your website, use the following CSS:


font-family: {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.family.css_font_stack.replace('"', '').replace('",', ', ')}};
font-style: italicnormal;
font-weight: {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.font.web.weight}};
        

Glyph Support & Stylistic Filters

Fonts in the Adobe Fonts library include support for many different languages, OpenType features, and typographic styles.