Harry Potter and the Medieval Typeface

Every Harry Potter fan probably remembers the newspaper in the wizards’ world. They might even know the name of its most irritating news hound, Rita Skeeter. They are far less likely, however, to know where it obtained its distinctive look, and this is hardly surprising.

It is a little known fact that The Daily Prophet owes its wizardly looks, in part, to two Muggles, former school friends (though not, of course, from Hogwarts), one of whom is a medievalist and computer officer at the University of Leicester and the other a Manchester doctor.

Alex Moseley became interested in medieval history and archaeology in the sixth form and, with his friend Roger Mills, started designing and digitising type faces, working freelance for a computer software company in rural Staffordshire, where they both lived.

His interest in combining ancient scripts with the newest technology was maintained throughout his years as an Archaeology student at the University of Leicester and continues now with his involvement in the Medieval Research Centre there. In their spare time, the two friends run a small, semi-academic company which researches old handwriting styles and turns them into typefaces for computers.

Alex commented: “Our typefaces have been used in a variety of public works, but most impressive so far has been their use in all four of the Harry Potter films, on various props and other elements. In the latest film, for example, The Daily Prophet newspaper featured is typeset entirely in our typefaces; we’ve also been the cover of the Book of Monsters, the ancient text within Moste Potente Potions, and parts of the Marauder’s Map!”

Their company, Crazy Diamond Design, produced its first major set of typefaces for the PC in 1997. Carefully researched, the designs proved popular with both scholars and crafts-people, including clergy, local historians and editors of newsletters, as well as academics and school teachers.

Alex claims to have been entrepreneurial right from his school days, successfully promoting Crazy Diamond Design as a mail order company in computer magazines and more recently on the Web.

Its theatrical potential was first discovered by the Royal Shakespeare Company which used Crazy Diamond fonts for their stage props and posters at the Barbican in London. Crazy Diamond have also used their fonts to produce a favourably reviewed children’s activity pack with an educational aspect.

Alex explained how interest had grown: “Since the RSC we’ve had a whole variety of users such as the National Trust, which uses our fonts for leaflets and signage, as well as educational groups like the University of Leicester Archaeological Services.

“About half a year before the first Harry Potter film came out, I got a call from a designer at Leavesden Studios, asking for permission to use our fonts in the film. Ever since then the designer (and others there) have produced beautiful props for the Harry Potter films utilising the whole range of our historical typefaces.

“Of course, many more props are prepared than those which are visible in the final films, but we’ve had something in every Harry Potter film so far. By the third film we were working with Roman and Celtic fonts (as yet unreleased) and we passed early versions of these to the props department.”

While all this sounds tremendous fun, research for the different ‘hands’ is meticulously carried out, starting with Leicester and Manchester libraries, the British Library and Bodleian Library and museums and libraries around the country, as well as studying other facsimiles in print.

The fonts are hand drawn from the original, and scanned into the computer before being hand-traced again on-screen. “We take care to recreate the original pen strokes and include all historical characters, runes and abbreviation marks,” Alex Moseley said. “The difficulty then is to get the script flowing well on screen and in print, as each character is taken from a different word in the source documents.”

When he visited the Leicester Medieval Research Centre to present a Public Lecture, former Monty Python member and current broadcaster on the Middle Ages, Terry Jones, was presented with a package of Crazy Diamond Design fonts, in which he showed great interest. Terry Jones is now a University Fellow with the English Department.

As for the future, Alex and Roger plan to create fonts representing writing forms from the past two millennia. They are currently working on Roman and Celtic hands and will be looking at the early medieval period next, before moving on to the early printing typefaces. —–