Astradyne

a typeface by Feòrag NicBhrìde

Astradyne is based on the font used on Ultravox’s Vienna LP from 1980, the name being taken from the first track on the album. The cover was designed by Glenn Travis, but the lettering was based on some done by drummer Warren Cann for an earlier photo session. There were only a few characters in the original, all upper-case, so I’ve had to design a lot of this myself. The bold weight is new with this version.

Astradyne 4.0 is a remastered version, though probably not a definitive remaster. Everything should look much better, though it’ll be hard to notice exactly what’s changed. There is a large number of glyphs, including accented characters for eastern European languages, Irish and Welsh, plus Cyrillic and Greek letters. The font also includes a long-s, and a selection of ligatures. These characters can be accessed by either choosing an appropriate keyboard layout in the International preferences panel, or via the Special Characters.../Glyphs menu option (the name seems to vary depending on the application).

The image below gives a sample of some of the characters included in the font:


The typeface comes in two 'flavours'. The OTF version is PostScript-flavoured OpenType; the TTF is TrueType-flavoured OpenType. Both should work on MacOS X, Linux and Windows systems. If you use MacOS 8 or 9, only the OTF version will work on these systems. If you have a PostScript printer, you should also choose the OTF version.

Creative Commons License
This typeface is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland license.

Note that the license includes the provision Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. You already have my permission to use this font for commercial purposes, such as in a magazine or advertising, and do not need to ask (though a copy of whatever you used it for would be nice). If you wish to redistribute this font commercially, including on a website with paid-for advertising, you must still get my permission to do so and you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

Download OTF version 4.0 [Zip 76 Kb]
Download TTF version 4.0 [Zip 91 Kb]