Items filed under: Type Design

Back in March, I mentioned that I was in the final stages of developing a new font family, Proxima Nova. It’s now about three months later and most of that time was taken up by doing the italic.

“What took so long?” you might wonder, “Isn’t it just a matter of slanting the roman version and saving it? That couldn’t take more than an minute or two.” As you may have guessed, it’s not that simple, especially if one wants to do it right. Allow me to illustrate.

Here is a sample set in Proxima Nova Bold:

Here it is simply slanted:

Notice how the curves have become distorted. The subtle modulation of the stroke weight is thrown completely out of whack, getting thinner in some places and thicker in others. This is especially noticeable with the S, O and P. Notice how the O looks kind of squashed. The A is also affected, but the difference is less obvious: the left stroke has become slightly thinner while the right stroke has become slightly thicker.

Characters like E and H, with only vertical and horizontal strokes, are virtually unaffected by slanting. However, any characters which are composed of curves or angled strokes must be optically corrected in a high quality font.

Here is the same sample set in Proxima Nova Bold Italic:

Much better, isn’t it? It takes a lot longer to make all those optical corrections, but the result—a font that simply looks right—is definitely worth it.

I expect to release Proxima Nova by the end of June. It’s available now.

Original (signed) drawings by type and lettering legend Ed Benguiat for his typeface Benguiat Gothic. Seen in the Type Gallery at TypeCon2004 in San Francisco on July, 24, 2004.

This photo shows my first attempt to create type on a computer screen. It is from about 1980.

The computer is that tiny white horizontal shape in the lower left, a Sinclair ZX80, which I bought mail order for $200. It had a 1mhz processor, 1k of memory, and built-in BASIC. The display is an old black and white television (not included). Programs and data were stored on a cheap cassette recorder (also not included).

The “a” image on the screen was created by programming the computer to display several lines of space and “block” characters in a certain order (which I worked out beforehand on graph paper). This is about as basic as a BASIC program can get.

Unfortunately, it took a good share of the computer’s memory just to do this. I didn’t investigate it further.

Update: I remember now. The thing on top of the tv is the cheap cassette recorder I used to store data. Yet more details: The “table” is made from a piece of plywood (which I still have) and a Crumar electric piano stand (which was sold with the piano to a guy who is now in prison for murder). (Not that it matters.)

This one was news to me: Jean François Porchez, proprietor of Porchez Typefoundrie in France, has a personal weblog called Chez Porchez. He also has a hand in the French type blog Le Typographe.com.

Berlin-based Erik Spiekermann, designer of the ubiquitous Meta, has one called spiekerblog. According to a recent interview on typeradio, he created it so he wouldn’t have to answer so many emails asking the same questions over and over.

Finally, one of the first weblogs I ever knew about was Grant Hutchinson’s splorp.blog. As a type designer, he was responsible for a large portion of the old Image Club type library. Image Club is no longer around, but, after several changes of hands, many of their fonts still are available through Agfa Monotype, including his ever-popular Fajita. Grant is now at Veer in Calgary, Alberta, which he helped start up with his Image Club cohorts. [Update: Veer no longer exists, so I removed the link.]