Skin & Bones (1972, 2024) was originally designed by Douglas F. Jones for VGC (Visual Graphics Corporation), which made the Photo Typositor, a headline-setting machine. Jones was inspired by Herbert Bayer’s geometric alphabets as part of The Bauhaus movement and thought that an inline treatment would be visually appealing. In 2017, Doug agreed to allow me to create an official, authorized digital version of Skin & Bones and re-release it through Mark Simonson Studio. The new version is a faithful digitization of Doug’s 1972 design but with a much larger character set with support for most Latin-based languages. While the original had quite a few alternate characters, the new version has even more (Doug-approved). It even supports arbitrary fractions and small figures. Doug made very little money from the VGC release, but royalties will be shared with him in this release.

For more about the story of Skin & Bones, read my interview with Doug here and a more detailed post about the genesis of the project on Notebook.