Mark Simonson's Notebook - Page 21

For the last four years, I’ve been working on a revival of the classic ATF Bookman Oldstyle and the Bookmans of the 1960s. But it’s not a slavish replica. It’s my own idea of what Bookman could be. It’s the revival I always wished someone would do.

I thought about doing a cursive italic, like others have tried, but in the end I decided that the original slanted roman should be preserved. Bookman has always been known for its swashes, so I also made a superset of the dozens of swash characters that have been added to Bookman over the years.

I wanted to go beyond its past and make something new. I added things that Bookman never had like small caps, old style figures, alternate characters, ligatures, stylistic sets, extensive language support, and more.

The family is composed of five weights—Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, and Black, plus italics.

It’s my love letter to the classic Bookman: Bookmania.

Coming soon to all the places you can get my fonts.

Follow @marksimonson on Twitter for updates on availability.

Update: Now available at Fontspring. Other distributors to follow.

I’ve also updated my website and added a page for Bookmania here where you can download a PDF specimen booklet.

Love this whole idea. This is how I set headlines when I was a young graphic designer. No way would I use a pencil, though. Too much risk of warping the sheet. I had a nylon-tipped burnisher, specially designed for the job of rubbing down transfer type. (Via Draplin)

Field Notes: Dry Transfer Edition Instructions from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

LetterMPress is a virtual letterpress app for the iPad—at least that’s the idea. The project is using Kickstarter to raise funds to complete the app and to acquire wood type fonts to include (virtually) in the app. More info on Kickstarter.

I think it’s a neat idea. Not only will you be able to make compositions on a virtual press bed with virtual wood type, mix and apply virtual ink, and make virtual prints, if all goes according to plan, you will be able to send them your design and have it all done for real, with real wood type, ink, and paper.

Some letterpress purists may scoff, but I think it has the potential to introduce the joys of letterpress printing to a much wider audience.

wwword, a website about words, did an interview with me [Update: wwword appears to be no longer operating, unfortunately, but here is a copy of the page on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine], where I talked about some of my favorite lettering pieces and how I did them.

The images that accompany the article are a bit small, so I’ve put larger versions up here….

One of my favorite bloggers, Jason Kottke, posted an item and link today about a story on the NPR site about “the longest word in the English language”.

This piqued my interest. When I was a kid I used to watch the Mike Douglas Show every afternoon after school. One time he had some sort of word expert on the show who revealed what the longest word was. I was impressed and taught myself to pronounce it correctly (still can).

Was it still the longest word? Sure enough, it was in the article:

Well… not the longest word anymore, if it ever was.

But then I noticed that all the “long words” in the article were set in one of my fonts—Felt Tip Woman! (My partner, Pat, whose handwriting was the model for Felt Tip Woman, loves words and language, not to mention NPR, and thought this was pretty cool, too.)

So I memorized a word that’s not really as special as I thought it was. On the plus side, NPR is using one of my fonts, so I’m happy anyway.

I was surprised and delighted to see Mostra Nuova playing a supporting role in JibJab’s latest “Year In Review” video.