Proxima Soft is an expanded and remastered version of Proxima Nova Soft (2011). Both are rounded versions of my Proxima Nova (2005).

Proxima Nova Soft was originally commissioned by MyFonts in 2010 for use on its website. The following year, after numerous requests, I released it to the general font market. Because MyFonts needed only a few styles (Regular, Medium, Semibold, and Bold), that’s all I did at the time.

Soon, I got requests to do a full family. This was easier said than done. I began work on the full family in 2013. After several false starts, over three years later, it’s finished.

Although the old and new families look similar, there are many small improvements in the design, not just a wider range of styles and more features.

Proxima Soft has the same 48 weights and styles as Proxima Nova—eight weights (Thin to Black), three widths (Normal, Condensed, and Extra Condensed), and both roman and italic for all weights and widths. There is one small difference—no small caps or old style figures. I included these in Proxima Nova, but I’ve never seen them used, so I decided not to put them into Proxima Soft. (I may add them later if people actually do want them.)

A Proxima Nova feature I do see used a lot is the set of alternate characters—a, l, y, and G. Proxima Soft includes them, as well as other Proxima Nova features such as arbitrary fractions, ordinals, and both proportional and tabular figures.

Proxima Soft also contains the same wide language coverage, including support for most Latin-based writing systems as well as Cyrillic, and Greek.

I would have preferred to keep the name Proxima Nova Soft, but there were some problems with that idea. First, there are limits to how long a font name can be. Proxima Nova already pushes the limits in the Condensed and Extra Condensed ranges, and adding the word Soft to every style and weight was not going to work. By calling the new family Proxima Soft, the font names will be exactly the same lengths as in Proxima Nova. Problem solved.

The other perhaps more important reason is that the shared styles—Regular, Medium, Semibold, and Bold—are not identical in design and spacing between the new and old version, which means that documents created with Proxima Nova Soft would have reflow issues if the new fonts were installed in its place, not to mention differences in appearance, especially at larger sizes.

If you liked Proxima Nova Soft, you’ll love Proxima Soft. It’s got more of everything and makes a great companion to Proxima Nova.

Proxima Soft is available at all of my distributors. See the Proxima Soft page for a complete list.

Proxima Nova version 2.008 is a major update. I’m in the process of getting it out to my distributors and it should be available from all of them within a couple of weeks.

New styles

Proxima Nova Medium. This is a new weight, available for all widths and styles. It sits between Regular and Semibold. It actually goes back to 2006, less than a year after Proxima Nova’s initial release. It was a custom weight requested by a UK magazine publisher. I’ve finally decided to officially invite it into the family.

For customers who have licensed an “all weights” or “complete” package, you should automatically get the new Medium styles when they become available at your vendor. The addition of Medium increases the size of the Proxima Nova family to 48 fonts in eight weights. Because of this, the prices of the “all weights” and “complete” packages will go up a bit accordingly.

New glyphs

• Prime and double prime, superior to “dumb” quotes for things like minutes, seconds, inches, and feet.
• Interrobangs because, well, why the hell not‽
• Small cap ¿ and ¡, which were mysteriously missing before. Okay, not so mysterious. I just forgot to put them in.
• Indian Rupee, a new currency symbol. Pretty clever and well thought out, as currency symbols go.
• Turkish Lira, another new currency symbol. Not as well thought out, in my opinion.
• Russian Ruble, another new currency symbol. It’s okay.
• Optional tabular figure 1 with serifs. This is used when you enable Tabular Lining Figures plus Stylistic Set 9.
• Capital eszett, (ẞ). Some German speakers think this is a stupid idea, some think it is long overdue. It’s there if you want it.
• A few additional Cyrillic characters used in Uzbekistan, Mongolia, and elsewhere.

Design changes

Making design changes to an existing and widely used font is not something I take lightly. That said, there were a couple of things I felt I had to change.

First, I slightly shortened the stroke at the top of the lowercase f to eliminate the need for ligatures. Unlike some fonts, the ligatures in Proxima Nova don’t connect in any way. Instead, they substitute an alternate f with a slightly shorter stroke at the top to avoid colliding with the i and l. Unfortunately, it is frequently the case that ligatures are not used when fonts are used on the web, and it really bothers me. But rather than try to get everyone to fix their websites, I decided it would be simpler to fix my admittedly problematic design of the f and use the alternate f instead, eliminating the need for ligatures entirely.

Second, I slightly shortened the tail of the lowercase j for similar reasons.

Both of these are cases where the me of today wonders what the me of yesterday was thinking. But they are subtle changes, I hope, and I hesitate to even call attention to them in case someone somewhere prefers the old f or j. I expect most won’t even notice the difference, and Proxima Nova will simply look nicer more of the time.

Other improvements

• Better hinting for Windows users. This is mostly an issue on Windows XP, an operating system released in 2001, for crying out loud. Anyway, on all versions of Windows, Proxima Nova will look better.
• Better cross-platform document sharing between the Windows and Mac versions of Microsoft Office. This is mostly related to the non-standard way that the Mac version identifies fonts. If they followed the standard, this wouldn’t be an issue. In any case, it works now, in spite of it all.
• The “bold” style shortcuts now only work with Regular and Regular Italic, yielding Bold and Bold Italic. In earlier versions, Semibold was the “bold” style of Light, and Extrabold was the “bold” style of Thin. Understandably, some Windows users had trouble finding the Semibold and Extrabold styles, not realizing they were hidden behind the “bold” style shortcut. Semibold and Extrabold now are listed in font menus, which should make Proxima Nova easier to use on Windows.
• **Full character sets for the optional fonts.**Proxima Nova Alt and Proxima Nova ScOsf now include the full Proxima Nova character set and language support (including Greek and Cyrillic), not just basic Western Latin.
• **Descriptive names for Stylistic Sets.**This is not widely supported yet, but when it is, Proxima Nova will be ready. So, instead of the sets being listed as Stylistic Set 1, Stylistic Set 2, Stylistic Set 3, and so on, they will be listed as Schoolbook Style, Geometric Sans Style, Alternate Uppercase G, and so on. Really looking forward to support for this, and you should be, too.

Specimens

You can see the new fonts in more detail in the updated downloadable Proxima Nova specimens:

Proxima Nova Overview. The story of Proxima Nova, basic style showings, full character set and technical information. 12 pages. 622 KB PDF.

Proxima Nova Full Specimen. The overview, plus complete text and display specimen for all styles of Proxima Nova, including the full character sets. 156 pages. 5.2 MB PDF.

Additional details You can find more info, test and license the fonts, and download PDF specimens on the Proxima Nova page.

I ran across this today in my studio while searching for something else. Given today’s big Typekit announcement (with which I’m participating), I thought it would be fun to post a photo of it. With this Type Kit, you only got one font.

My new Bookmania fonts are now available at my own site, and Fontspring. More vendors will be added to this list as they are ready. Update: Bookmania is now available at nearly all my distributors and on my own website. To buy it from me directly, see the Bookmania page, under Buy.

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.

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.