Catan.com
The Settlers of Catan is a multiplayer board game conceived by Klaus Teuber and first published in 1995 in Germany as Die Siedler von Catan. Its continued popularity has led to the creation of a great many spinoff games and products.
Catan.com is the official platform for all things Catan. Minion Pro (Robert Slimbach, 1990/2000) is used throughout the website. Four styles of the all-purpose serif are served via Typekit. Most of the text is set in the Roman and, surprisingly often, the Italic. The Bold is reserved for subheadings, while the Bold Italic apparently has been included “just in case”. For very small copy, the design resorts to Arial.
On a microtypographic level, there are a few blemishes. With a big W_elcome on the start page, it would have been a good idea to activate kerning. The texts on the carousel banners are rendered as images, and unfortunately in a similar but different typeface – Adobe Garamond, another oldstyle serif by Slimbach. More than once, inadvertently inserted straight quotes and apostrophes stick out like sore thumbs among the otherwise organic letterforms.
The project is a collaborative effort of Michaela Kienle (feintuning), Annette Kara (anoka Illustration & Design), Michael Menzel, and Gerrit van Aaken (praegnanz.de).
