Sketch from about 1981.

Synergy started as an idea I had about 1981. I found a couple of sketches in my collection of typeface ideas going back to the seventies, which I started scanning and organizing in 2009. I don’t remember a lot about this particular idea except that I was aiming for a “Scandinavian” feel (whatever that meant to me at the time) and that the 1970s Allstate logo was an influence.

Early drafts.

I thought it was a promising idea and did a draft of the lowercase in a couple of weights in 2012, then another draft in 2018, which included capitals and a full range of weights from very thin to very bold, using three “masters.” (Masters are used in modern type design to generate intermediate weights automatically from a small set of key drawings.)

Weights and styles of Synergy.

Then, in 2024, I decided to complete the design, adding a set of italics for all weights and features such as small caps and old style figures.

Synergy is basically a neo-grotesque along the lines of Swiss faces such as Univers, but with a two-story “g” more characteristic of British and American models. This wasn’t a deliberate decision, but I think the constraints I gave myself—even somewhat narrow proportions, squarish curves, squared-off stroke endings—steered me in that direction. I think I succeeded in giving it more warmth than this type of design usually has, thanks to some subtle details in the curve endings, and the two-story “g” relieves the monotony in text.

The two-story “g” and subtle details in the curved stroke endings are reminiscent of British grotesques.

I was careful to make sure Synergy works well in text in the middle range of the weights. It also works for display use, and the extreme weights (Hairline, Thin, and Ultra) are intended exclusively for that.

A text sample.

Synergy has nine weights. If that’s not enough, there is also a variable version. It features small caps (with matching punctuation) and old style figures in all styles. It has support for most Latin-based languages and currencies, arbitrary fractions, and a set of matching dingbats.

A small sampling of the character set.

Synergy is available now. More information here.

When I decided to sell the rights to my library of fonts to The Type Founders in 2021, one of the big reasons for me was the ever-growing burden of maintaining and developing that library.

As a one-person studio, there was only so much I could do. Proxima Nova had become very popular since I released it in 2005, and I regularly got requests to expand its language coverage.

At first, I did this task myself, adding support for Greek and Vietnamese in 2009 and Cyrillic in 2010. Even though I can’t read languages that use these writing systems, they were close enough to the Latin alphabet that I felt sufficiently confident to design them. But I’ve always felt out of my depth as a type designer even thinking about designing non-Latin fonts.

Still, I could see that adding even more language support would make a lot of sense for such a popular type family. Theoretically, I could hire other designers and production people to help, either as employees or as contractors. But that would mean managing those people, something I know I’m not very good at.

I like working by myself, and I would rather spend my time working on new typefaces.

It was around the time I was thinking about these problems back in 2019 that I was approached by Paley Dreier (now Managing Partner of The Type Founders) about selling my font library. It was something I’d never thought about before, but I eventually realized that it would be a neat solution to my problems. I would be relieved of the burden of maintaining and expanding my existing fonts, giving me time to focus on designing and releasing new fonts—which is what I’ve been doing for the last few years, with the release of Proxima Sera, Dreamboat, Proxima Nova Wide and Extra Wide, Viroqua, Cheesecake, Madcap, Gertie, and Skin & Bones. In fact, I’m currently working on a new sans serif family, the first since Proxima Nova, if you don’t count display faces.

In the meantime, The Type Founders has been working to expand language support for Proxima Nova, with the aid of some really talented type designers from around the world. We’ve dubbed the fruits of this effort Proxima Super Nova.

In addition to most Western and Eastern European Latin, Greek, Vietnamese, and Cyrillic, Proxima Nova now supports Arabic, Devanagari, and Thai (both looped and loopless). More writing systems are in the works, including Hebrew and Hangeul.

Check out the Proxima Super Nova mini-site to find out all about it.

If you have any questions, are interested in extended or enterprise licensing, or need additional language support or customizations, get in touch! Send a note to info@marksimonson.com

A big thanks to the following people:

Proxima Nova Thai: Smich Smanloh of Cadson Demak

Proxima Nova Devanagari: Vaibhav Singh and Alessia Mazzarella of Typeland

Proxima Nova Arabic: Khajag Apelian and Wael Morcos

The mini-site: Elliot Jay Stocks (site design and content development) and Roel Nieskens (site development)

Project management and production support: Glenda Bellarosa and Dyana Weissman

Last week I did a talk for Type Tuesday in Minneapolis where I did a live demo of early font editors on a real Macintosh Plus. I’ve uploaded a video recording of it on YouTube, or you can watch it here.

6/27/24 Update: I’ve also posted a video about the story behind the Mac Plus I used for my Type Tuesday talk:

I took a break from my usual practice of working on larger families to create a trio of heavyweight display typefaces: Cheesecake, Madcap, and Gertie. They come from different historical periods—and different periods in my life.

Cheesecake is the most recent design. It bubbled up from my subconscious over the last ten years while I was working on Dreamboat. Like Dreamboat, it’s a “bold script” style, but it has more in common with 1970s lettering and fonts, and is a simpler design without any need for fancy OpenType magic in order to set properly.

I tried to push the weight as far as I could without sacrificing legibility. It has an alternate lowercase “s” (in case you’re not into that old-school cursive form) and a set of matching dingbats and symbols.

Madcap goes back to my high school years in the early seventies, before I was even thinking about type design. I worked on student publications and often did lettering in a cartoony, all-caps style, with overlapping letters. I was influenced by vintage MAD magazine and Hallmark and American Greetings’ psychedelic period.

Madcap has a few special features: An alternate lowercase-style E and a set of matching dingbats and symbols.

Gertie is a design that’s been in the back of my mind since the late nineties. The inspiration is Winsor McCay’s distinctive lettering in his iconic Little Nemo comic strips from the early twentieth century. Think of it as Copperplate Gothic on steroids. The name comes from McCay’s 1914 animated short Gertie the Dinosaur—the first fully-realized animated cartoon character.

As an all-caps design, it can be awkward to set words and abbreviations that normally contain lowercase like “McCAY” or “4th” or “Co.” So I’ve included a set of raised caps for those situations. And it works with more than one letter in a row. You can also use it for the cents part of prices. Like Cheesecake and Madcap, it includes a set of matching dingbats and symbols.

All three fonts are available now.

In 1984, I bought one of the original 128K Macs. A big draw for me was how it could display multiple fonts—proportional or fixed-width—anywhere on its screen. I desperately wanted to make my own fonts for it. This was before modern PostScript/TrueType/OpenType fonts, back when there were only “bitmap” fonts—fonts composed of discrete black and white pixels.

That summer, I read about an Apple developer tool called Font Editor 2.0 and sent for a copy of it. It was crude and crashed easily, but it allowed me to make my first Macintosh bitmap fonts. (A little later, AltSys released FONTastic, which was better in every possible way, including being less crash-prone.)

Recently, I fell down the rabbit hole investigating and reacquainting myself with Font Editor 2.0. I wound up making a user guide and a video demo and walk-through. I also prepared some disk images you can use with a real 128K or 512K Macintosh computer or an emulator, such as Mini vMac if you want to try it out for yourself.

I’m planning to make more videos about early font development on the Mac in the near future on my YouTube channel.

Skin & Bones is an unusual font release for me. It’s not only a revival, it’s a designer-authorized revival. It was originally designed by Douglas F. Jones and released as a 2” film font in 1972 by VGC (Visual Graphics Corporation, now defunct). I got to know Doug by email in 2017 after a friend of his saw him mentioned in a Notebook post of mine from 2013. He agreed to do an interview as a follow-up to that post. You can read the interview here, which I recently published in anticipation of the release of my revival of Skin & Bones.

While we were doing the interview, I noted that there was no official digital version of Skin & Bones—and the free, unauthorized version which has been around for a while is not only very poor, but incomplete. It’s missing the alternate characters that Doug designed for the 1972 film font. When I proposed doing a proper, fully-modern digitization of Skin & Bones, Doug was all for it.

Doug no longer had any of the original artwork, so my digitization is based mainly on available samples from vintage VGC catalogs, promotional brochures, and even the unauthorized Chartpak lettering sheets.

VGC film fonts had a pretty limited character set by modern standards—uppercase and lowercase (sometimes with alternate characters), figures, basic punctuation, and a few symbols (usually $, ¢, £, an asterisk, and an ampersand). (You can see the entire character set in the image above.) Often, there weren’t even accents or “foreign” characters, which kind of made sense at the time since the primary market was the U.S., Canada, and Britain. The unauthorized version did have a few accents and as well as Æ, æ, Œ, œ, and ß, but they weren’t very good and didn’t follow the design logic of Skin & Bones.

After I digitized the existing characters as faithfully as I could and got Doug’s approval, I expanded it to modern standards. This included designing a full set of diacritical characters to cover most Western-, Central-, and Eastern-European Latin-based languages, as well as small figures (for superscript, subscript, and fractions), a full set of punctuation and delimiters (parentheses, brackets, and braces), and the standard range of symbols and currency marks.

Beyond this, I added a few new alternate characters, including variations of Æ/æ/Œ/œ based on Doug’s original alternates for A, E, and e. My most significant additions are the alternate S/s, which follow a more conventional form, rather than the “lazy S” style that Doug used, and alternate full dots on the i, j, !, and ?.

I did make one change to Doug’s original design in the X/x, which I thought (and Doug agreed) could be made more consistent with the design logic of the alphabet. His original X and x are available as stylistic alternates for completeness, plus three new variations I came up with. If you’re setting anything with an X, you’ve got lots of options.

Unlike the original VGC film font, the digital version of Skin & Bones is carefully spaced and kerned so it automatically sets perfectly. It includes support for OpenType features like Named Stylistic Sets (to make it easy to use the alternate characters), Localized Forms, Subscript and Superscript, Fractions, and Ligatures.

To sum up, Skin & Bones is a classic early-seventies Bauhaus-inspired display typeface, expertly remastered and extended for modern use.

The royalties for the sales of Skin & Bones will be shared with Doug, who made a total of $240 after it was originally released by VGC. I expect he will do better this time.

You can purchase the font here.