Mason comes in both a serif and sans serif version, and each package comes with three variants: Regular, Alternate, and Super, each in two weights. Together, these fonts contain several variants for each alphabetic character, each in a capital, small cap, and super script cap version.
In its design, Barnbrook was influenced by nineteenth-century Russian letter forms, Greek architecture, and Renaissance Bibles. The font also displays many references to popular culture, politics, and typographic history. Mason’s postmodern attitude is undeniable and, like Jeffery Keedy’s Keedy Sans, Mason emerged during the explosion of digital typefaces in the early 1990s, both products of the technological and cultural influences of the time.
Barnbrook originally called this typeface Manson (after American serial killer Charles Manson) “to express extreme opposite emotions of love and hate, beauty and ugliness.” After releasing the font, Emigre came under heavy scrutiny for glorifying a murderer, and decided to change the name to Mason, as the letter forms also evoke stonecutters’ work, Freemasons’ symbology, and pagan iconography.
Emigre Fonts is a digital type foundry and publisher of type specimens and artist books based in Berkeley, California. From 1984 until 2005 Emigre published the legendary Emigre magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to visual communication. The Emigre font library features more than 600 original typefaces, including Mrs Eaves, Brothers, Matrix and Filosofia.
As with everything from Adobe Fonts, you can use these fonts for:
Design Projects
Create images or vector artwork, including logos
Website Publishing
Create a Web Project to add any font from our service to your website
PDFs
Embed fonts in PDFs for viewing and printing
Video and Broadcast
Use fonts to create in-house or commercial video content
How to Use
You may encounter slight variations in the name of this font, depending on where you use it. Here’s what to look for.
Desktop
In application font menus, this font will display:
{{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.preferred_family_name}} {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.preferred_subfamily_name}}Web
To use this font on your website, use the following CSS:
font-family: {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.family.css_font_stack.replace('"', '').replace('",', ', ')}};
font-style: italicnormal;
font-weight: {{familyCtrl.selectedVariation.font.web.weight}};
Glyph Support & Stylistic Filters
Fonts in the Adobe Fonts library include support for many different languages, OpenType features, and typographic styles.