The Henderson is a proprietary typeface family designed by Jean François Porchez for the number two management and strategic consulting worldwide firm in 2006, in association with The Creative Factory.
This typeface family is designed to convey a strong personality to the Boston Consulting Group communication tools. It asserts The group’s faith in progress and modernity while remaining true to its heritage and history. It contributes both to strengthening company’s presence in the market and to enhancing the reader’s comfort through increased clarity and readability.
Henderson Serif
5 weights family.
Henderson – built in TrueType OpenType format – family take its roots on the work of John Baskerville. He was an English punchcutter who invented a new typeface around the middle of the 17th century and several new technics to print on coated paper. There are various interpretations of Baskerville today, most of them have been created in “several sizes” for metal typesetting. Later, with phototypesetting, only one master was designed for all sizes. That’s why the current contrast of the ITC New Baskerville used previously is slightly too high and not perfectly suitable to text setting on contemporary coated paper. The Henderson Serif, more contemporary in its interpretation increases legibility in text settings. Henderson Serif is set at 11 pts equal to ITC New Baskerville set at 12 pts in optical size, but more economical in widths.
Historical typefaces such as Baskerville feature a small xheight (the size of the small lowercases), whereas today sanserifs feature large xheight as Arial, a common sanserif used by the company. In our present case, its seems more appropriate to keep Arial as a reference due to its capacity to be easily used on screen and everyday office documents.
Henderson Sans
Started with a family of 4 weights in 2007, 4 new weights have been added in 2009 at client request.
Based on Henderson Serif, itself based on Baskerville, Henderson Sans can be definite as one of the first transitional sanserif, at mid distance between humanistic sanserifs like Gill Sans and grotesk sanserifs like Helvetica and Arial. Henderson Sans still remain close to Arial, in a sense that Henderson Sans is based on an ancestor style of Arial. Henderson Sans structure is modulated and its terminals not yet structurally well organised while its design is already clean and net. Finally, Henderson Sans can easily be switched from Arial back and forth.
Furthermore, Henderson Serif and Sans are built on the same structure and the same proportions to be easily exchanged at anytime without too much effect on layout and text length and size.
Henderson is a proprietary typeface who will never be made available to the general public.
