Athelas goes from iBooks to Hollywood in Hidden Figures
- Project Date
- August 2017
- Date
- August 2017
As type designers we cannot control where and how our typefaces are used. That decision is made by graphic designers, or users in general, and sometimes we have found our fonts in situations we could not have imagined.
When José Scaglione designed Athelas as a typeface to be used in continuous texts, preferably in print, he could not envision it would end up being part of the MacOS system as one of the typefaces of their iBooks app. Now readers around the world can use it to read the news or their favorite book on their phones, for instance.
And he could not have dreamt that Athelas would become a Hollywood star. That is exactly what happened in the movie Hidden Figures, the story of a team of female African-American mathematicians who served at NASA in the 1960s. The cast includes Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner, Kirsten Dunst and Jim Parsons, and of course, Athelas.
