Mikadan

I released Mikadan on April 13, 2006, as a commission for BioWare’s Dragon Age series. The challenge was to strike a balance between medieval atmosphere and modern readability. I studied samples of Verona by Stephenson Blake, William Dana Orcutt’s Humanistic, and Morris Fuller Benton’s Motto, borrowing ideas for proportions, serif forms, and stroke logic from all three. The result was a blackletter-influenced face that evoked medieval fantasy while remaining clear on a television screen.

BioWare requested decorative alternates, so I created a set of drop-cap capitals to reinforce the fantasy setting. Mikadan was designed specifically for in-game use rather than for printed material. Beyond Dragon Age, it later appeared in the 2018 game Kingdom Come: Deliverance and on the cover of Ann Shelton’s 2024 book worm, root, wort… & bane.

In 2021, I revised Mikadan to keep it technically current. I removed obsolete characters, refined OpenType features, adjusted kerning, redesigned Cyrillic forms, and corrected quotation marks. These changes preserved its appearance while improving usability. Mikadan remains a paid release.