Originally conceived for an Australian newspaper that required a condensed body typeface, the Décennie project took on a life of its own.

For the PC, it is one of the best-hinted families available, taking into account growing web usage. Perhaps oddly, it is slightly condensed, but Jack Yan’s own tests showed that the roman and bold weights remained very legible despite the lower resolution of the screen, and allowed for greater copyfitting—not always a consideration for web designers.
Close up, outlines consist of curves and straight lines running into each other, although at small sizes this is not evident. The typeface family was released in December 1997, 10 years after the founding of Jack Yan & Associates.

A family is born

In 2000, Yan designed the Décennie Titling, partly inspired by Jean-François Porchez’s Le Monde Titrage created for the French daily. Previously, Jack Yan had developed his first sans serif typeface for his own foundry, although he had completed work on several others for clients. Décennie Express has many of the traits of the original, including the stroke contrast and even some characters (e, o, t). The curves-meet-straights idea of the seriffed Décennie is retained here and is more obvious. Like the original, screen usage was a priority for the PC versions, although less so for the Macintosh ones. It has since become one of JY&A Fonts’ most popular families.