Typeface · Other
Compacta
Compacta is a condensed sans-serif typeface designed by Fred Lambert for Letraset in 1963.
About Compacta
Compacta is a condensed sans-serif typeface designed by Fred Lambert for Letraset in 1963. It is visually similar to the typefaces Impact and Haettenschweiler, though Compacta has a distinctively square shape in comparison. Letraset was a dry transfer system, widely used by amateur or small-scale lettering projects, although many professional designers used it as well. Compacta was Letraset's first original typeface design, and proved widely popular. Rights to it were acquired by Linotype and others, leading to it becoming available in other formats such as digitally. Compacta was reportedly designed to be similar to stencilled alphabets of the 1920s and to the 'much lusted-after' Schmalfette Grotesk, an upper-case only predecessor to Haettenschweiler, which had tended to attract attention among British designers but was not available in the United Kingdom.
From the Wikipedia article “Compacta (typeface)”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Using Compacta in a book
Test this typeface at both text and display sizes before committing; print a sample page at final size.
Commercial typefaces require a licence that covers embedding in PDFs and ebooks; check the foundry's licence before you publish.
Sources & data
- Structured data from Wikidata Q5155329 (CC0).
- Summary text from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).