New typeface using intricate designs from Shakespeare's First Folio (2023)

To mark the First Folio’s 400th anniversary, Shakespeare’s Globe and south London type studio Typeland created Amifer Folio, a custom display typeface for posters promoting the theatre’s summer season. The project draws on ornamental initials and woodcut decorations in the 1623 collection, which preserved 18 of Shakespeare’s plays, including The Tempest, Macbeth and As You Like It. The designs also connect to the season’s focus on the natural world, moving between wilderness and cultivated landscapes.

The Globe’s in-house design team selected motifs from the Folio, and Typeland adapted them into a coherent typographic system. The all-capital alphabet fills each letter with intricate patterns and figures drawn from the original prints, including angels, demons, gargoyles, animals and foliage. A central challenge was keeping the ornament legible and effective at different scales. Amifer Folio therefore comes in two styles: Small, with simplified decoration for reduced sizes, and a denser version for larger, more prominent use. The resulting posters treat historical printing details not simply as references, but as adaptable graphic material for contemporary theatre promotion. The project also highlights the Folio’s physical rarity: fewer than 200 copies are known to remain.