Proxima Nova stars in a new animated short film by Brent Barson, sponsored by Veer: “F is for Fail” (and co-starring Adobe’s Arno Pro). The still from the film (above) sums up my reaction. Well done, Brent! (And thanks to Veer, too.)
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Proxima Nova stars in a new animated short film by Brent Barson, sponsored by Veer: “F is for Fail” (and co-starring Adobe’s Arno Pro). The still from the film (above) sums up my reaction. Well done, Brent! (And thanks to Veer, too.)
Well, this has been a long time coming.
Variable fonts (a.k.a., OT-VAR, or OpenType Variable) started to become a thing in late 2016, with backing by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and Google. The standard took a while to be worked out, but it's fairly settled now.
The good news is that variable fonts work great in all the major web browsers, and the web is where variable fonts make the biggest difference. It lets you put an entire font family with unlimited styles into a single font file that is about the same size as a few traditional fonts. This gives the web designer a much larger typographic palette without the bandwidth penalty.
On the desktop, variable fonts are not as well-supported. Adobe Creative Cloud apps (Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign) have good support at this point. Others include Sketch and Corel Draw. You can see a current list here. I expect this will improve over time and, eventually, they will work everywhere.
I knew from the beginning that I would want to do a variable version of Proxima Nova. I started work on it in late 2017. This was when support was low and the standard was in flux, so it sat on the back burner after some initial tests.
In Spring of 2019, I enlisted the help of Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer and his team at Schriftlabor for technical and production assistance. Although I'm an old hand at making OpenType and other kinds of fonts, I felt a bit out of my depth with variable fonts. Given the amount of user stress that a variable version of a face as popular as Proxima Nova would need to withstand, I needed to bring in an expert. Rainer has been at the cutting edge of variable font technology, including being one of the developers of Glyphs (the app I use to make fonts), so it was in good hands.
Nearly two years later, I'm ready to introduce Proxima Vara. (You can try it out here.)
Proxima Vara is a completely new family, not an update to Proxima Nova, and there are some differences. One is that the default figure style is tabular rather than proportional. This was often requested by Proxima Nova users, but changing it would have affected existing users' documents. There are also improvements to character shapes and spacing.
Proxima Vara, as a variable font, contains built-in weight and style "instances" that match Proxima Nova and can be selected in font menus, as if they were separate fonts. There are six new styles, in the new Extralight weight, making 54 styles, up from 48.
Unlike Proxima Nova, you are not limited to these built-in styles and can specify any arbitrary style along the weight, width, and slant axes using sliders or by specifying values, for example in CSS. In all, there are 5,000,000 possible styles, going from Thin Extra Condensed to Black Italic.
Licenses for Proxima Vara start at US$99 for a basic desktop license and will be rolling out at most of my distributors starting today. (See "Where to Buy" on this page.)
The one exception is Adobe Fonts (a.k.a., Typekit), which is unfortunately not yet ready to host variable fonts for web or desktop use.
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.
Viroqua's ancestor, Excalibur, hand inked.
I released Kandal in 1994. It's one of my earliest typeface designs, going all the way back to an earlier design in 1978, which I submitted it to International Typeface Corporation (ITC) under the name "Excalibur". It went through a couple of iterations before the one I submitted, variously influenced by the work of Hermann Zapf and Jim Parkinson. I honestly had very little idea what I was doing—a case of overestimating what I knew and underestimating how much was left to know. By a large margin. Excalibur was understandably rejected by ITC. It had lots of problems and I resolved to improve my knowledge and skills before trying to submit something to them again.
Fast-forward to 1990. I never did submit any more typefaces to ITC, but I did have lots of ideas and sketches and practice drawing letters. I also got a Mac in 1984 and Fontographer in 1987 and started trying to make PostScript fonts. One of my ideas was to revisit Excalibur, simplifying the design and addressing its many flaws. This became Kandal. I was also working on Proxima Sans, the predecessor to Proxima Nova, around the same time, and a few other ideas, some of which are still on the drawing board.
Kandal has never been one of my popular typefaces. It's not surprising, given that it was such an early design, made when I had very little experience making fonts. I probably should have pulled it from my library, but I kept thinking I would come back to it and fix it, like I did with Proxima Sans.
Thirty years later, it's finally happened. The new version is reworked from the ground up, so I decided to give it a completely different name, instead of something like Kandal Nova. "Kandal" was my paternal grandmother's maiden name and the town in Norway her family was from. The new name, "Viroqua", is the town in Southwestern Wisconsin where she was born and raised.
Viroqua is an improvement over Kandal in every way I could think of, while retaining its core design concept: A hybrid combining modern proportions, Jenson-like details, and a bit of slab serif DNA. Nearly every character has been reworked or refined. The original italic especially suffered from my lack of experience as a type designer. I basically started over. I've got three more decades of experience and I hope it shows.
Viroqua also has a wider range of weights, seven in all, going from Thin to Black.
Viroqua features many typographical niceties missing from Kandal, such as small caps, old style and lining figures (both proportional and tabular), superscript and subscript figures, fractions, and dingbats. Viroqua also supports most Latin-based Western and Eastern European languages, plus Vietnamese.
Viroqua is available now. More information here.
I've made a big update to one of my most popular type families, Mostra Nuova.
First, I've added three new weights: Semibold, Extrabold, and Extraheavy. The Semibold weight was based on a request from a user. He had a good point. There was a big jump in weight between Regular and Bold. Sometimes you need something between those. While I was at it, I noticed that there were similar jumps—maybe not quite as big, but jumps nonetheless—between Bold and Heavy, and between Heavy and Black. You'd rarely need all these at once, but it's easier now to get just the right weight.
Second, I've added support for Cyrillic. I've been doing this a little at a time with my existing type families. So far, I've added Cyrillic to Proxima Nova, Proxima Soft, Goldenbook, Refrigerator Deluxe, Changeling Neo, and Felt Tip Roman. It was quite fun to do Cyrillic for Mostra Nuova. I found lots of examples of Cyrillic Art Deco lettering online to get an idea how it should work. But I also got feedback from Russian type designer Ilya Ruderman, to make sure what I was doing made sense to native readers. (I've gotten to know the Cyrillic alphabet fairly well over the years, and can sound out words, but I can't really read it.)
Of course, there are all the same kinds of alternate characters in the Cyrillic as there are for the original Latin characters.
It also features Bulgarian variants. Bulgarian Cyrillic is pretty interesting. A lot of the letters, especially in the lowercase, look more like the Latin alphabet.
Finally, based on a user request, I added a narrow alternate D to match the narrow C, G, and c. And, based on no requests at all, I added the capital sharp S for German users who might want it.
The new version of Mostra Nuova is already available at some of my distributors, and the rest should soon follow.
Okay, I was originally going to post one or two more detailed reports about the conference. But it’s kind of old news now. Suffice it to say, I had a blast and met lots of interesting type people I hadn’t met before—Chester (Thirst & Village), Yves Peters (Typographer.org, etc.), Steve Jackaman (International Type Founders), David Berlow (The Font Bureau), Akira Kobayashi (Linotype), Mario Feliciano (a very talented type designer from Portugal), Peter Bain (Incipit), Gerry Leonidas (Reading/UK), Stephan Hattenbach (MAC Rhino Fonts, Sweden), Carol Wahl, (Type Directors Club), Rodrigo X Cavazos (Psy Ops), Dan Reynolds (Linotype), and too many others to mention—as well as catching up with previous acquaintances again.
Several cool things happened that I have to mention:
The weekend before TypeCon started, I was mentioned in an article about small type foundries in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. I knew this article was coming out because, of course, the reporter talked to me a few weeks before. There wasn’t much about me in the article, but I think I gave the writer some good leads.
My new Proxima Nova was reviewed in a “keepsake” limited edition booklet put together by Typographer.org. (More about it here.)
Finally, on Friday morning there was a presentation by SpotCo, a design/advertising studio in New York that does nothing but Broadway publicity work. I hadn’t heard of them before, but recognized some of their work (most famous of which is probably their campaign for “Rent” in the mid-90s). All very nice work. But I did a double-take in the middle of it when they showed the slide shown at right. Mostra Bold on Broadway. How cool is that? I’m not the only one: They used Eric Olson’s Bryant for the Lennon show.
So, that’s it for TypeCon2005. Now back to our regular programming…
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