[OpenFontLibrary] Revival of the fittest

[Ben Weiner]

Hi Nathan,

On 24 Jun 2010, at 22:21, Nathan Willis wrote:

> I mentioned this to a couple of you individually at LGM this year, but for everyone else, I decided I want to work on a revival -- in large part to get better with the font toolchain but without having to start entirely from scratch.  
> 
> So I've been looking over sample books and trying both find something I like and to cross reference what's there with existing open fonts....  But rather than just pick out something that I like the looks of personally, I'd prefer to work on something useful, so I was hoping I could solicit opinions from the more knowledgable folks on the list about my current crop of candidates.  If anything of these have been done already under an open license, or bear striking similarities to one, then they're off my list.  On top of that, though, if any in particular is a better choice for some other reason that you know of, I'm all ears.

(bypassing your list, sorry - I'm a bit of a text type freak)

There are few nice permissively-licensed sans serif typefaces in anything like the 'grotesque' or 'gothic' style. They were in fashion a few years ago but have gone back into the woodwork.

Twentieth-century examples include Monotype Grotesque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotype_Grotesque along with a bevy of other loosely-related designs including Franklin Gothic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_gothic, News Gothic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_Gothic. 

Being sanserifs you can create large families with big fat bolds and super-thin light weights using a bit of judgement and a bit of interpolation... I have long intended to produce my own 'grot' but it seems fairly clear to me that I never will get around to it.

On the other hand this is all a long way from your Art Nouveau/Art Deco choices - not in time but in purpose ;-)

Cheers
Ben

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Ben Weiner | http://readingtype.org.uk/about/contact.html 
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