In 2003, I released my interpretation of China, an old VGC face, which I called Changeling. I redesigned many of the characters for more even type color. I also added lowercase-style variants to nearly all the uppercase forms, for endless “unicase” combinations, alternate forward- and back-slanting characters for A, M, V, and W, and a more complete character set. I spaced it to emulate the “tight, but not touching” style of spacing popular in the ’70s. Finally, I created four new styles—Light, Regular, Stencil, and Inline.
Changeling Neo (2008) builds on this with even more alternate characters (including a few from VGC China I had previously left out), extensive language support, and lots of improvements in fit and finish. Changeling Neo is available exclusively in the OpenType format. Alternate characters are accessed using OpenType Stylistic Alternates and Stylistic Sets features. Standard characters that were “hijacked” in Changeling (to make room for alternate characters) have been reinstated. Changeling Neo also includes support for fractions, superscript and subscript, as well as tabular figures.
For more information, I’ve made two PDFs you can download:
Changeling Neo is available now.
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I’ve been interested in the classic script style of the early 20th century for as long as I’ve been drawing letters. It was commonly used in logos and trademarks, meant to convey the idea of a signature. Think: Ford. Coca-Cola. Coors. Blatz. Schlitz. Rainier. Campbells soup. Any number of baseball clubs. The style was revived in the 1960s, sometimes evolving into psychedelic or pop-art forms.
There have been fonts from time to time based on this script style, but quite often they have more of a sixties or seventies look. I decided to try my hand, hoping to get closer to the early 1900s feel.
In 2004, I pitched the concept to House Industries. They liked idea, and we made a deal to develop the script, along with a sans and a serif, all with a “sports” theme.
Working with Ken Barber, I was impressed with his commitment to quality and detail. I thought I was an okay type designer at the time, but my experience with Ken significantly raised my standards on all the fonts I’ve done since then. Unfortunately, the project languished due to other priorities at House and was eventually put on hold.
Around 2012, I decided to resume work on the script on my own. At that point, only the lowercase and a few caps had really been drawn, and I was really itching to design the rest of the caps.
In 2017, I showed Ken what I’d been up to with the script. I asked if he thought House was ever going to get the project going again, and, if not, could we amend the agreement to allow me to release it myself? Long story short, House agreed.
With the script fully in my hands, I stepped up the pace to finish it. Five years later, the result is Dreamboat.
Back when I was working on it with House, there was only a single bold weight. To provide more flexibility for designers, I expanded this to six—Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, Extrabold, and Black. (Dreamboat might be the only script in its genre with such a wide weight range.)
One of the things that bug me about a lot of script typefaces is lack of a solution to situations where you need to set something in all caps, such as roman numerals or acronyms. For that I added small caps.
There is also a stylistic set which raises the cross-bar of the lowercase “t” and extends it for more of a custom look.
To top it off, Dreamboat includes three styles of tails—an element quite often used with bold scripts.
Check out the User Guide to see how it all works. Tip: Many of my vendors have type testers where you can type your own text and see how it looks. The tails work by typing one or more underscores at the end of a word. Just make sure that ligatures are enabled on the site (sometimes they are not).
I never dreamed when I started that it would take nearly 20 years to finish Dreamboat. But, to be honest, I’m glad it did because it was really beyond my skills when I first started working on it. It’s been one of the most enjoyable typefaces to design, and I’m excited to see what people will do with it.
Dreamboat is available at all the usual places for desktop, web, and other uses.
I’m very excited to introduce a brand new typeface family that’s been on my back burner for decades: Etna.
It was inspired mainly by the Aetna style of wood type from the 1880s. Etna tames this quirky Victorian design transforming it into a complete family suitable for modern use, adding a full range of six weights and italics, allowing it to work equally well for both text and display.
The Etna family also includes three different condensed widths in all six weights intended for display use. These are meant to be used LARGE.
All 30 styles include four different figure styles, alternate characters, true small caps, and a selection of dingbats, including arrows, stars, asterisks, and manicules (pointing hands).
Etna is just rolling out starting today. You’ll find a list of places where you can buy a desktop, web, app, or ebook license on the main Etna page on my site. There is also a nice Etna mini-site that tells the complete story of Etna and the history of the Aetna genre.
Thanks to Nick Sherman for designing and coding the mini-site and to David Shields for writing the history section. Also thanks to Nick for suggesting that I add the manicules and many other features. Finally, thanks to Schriftlabor for technical assistance in developing the fonts.
Ginger is the most recent Filmotype font I’ve digitized. (See also Zanzibar and Glenlake.) It’s the first in a range of Filmotype “G” series fonts—condensed sans serifs whose names all start with “G”—that have many Futura-like features that are unusual for the style. I was interested in this range of typefaces even before I knew about Filmotype. Few of them have ever been digitized before. I plan to do all of them eventually (sooner than later, I hope).
To bring Ginger into the 21st century meant designing dozens of new characters to expand its limited character set. Caps, lowercase, numbers and a few symbols and punctuation marks might have been okay back in the 1950s, but today’s fonts are global citizens and have to play as well in Prague as they do in Peoria. In designing the new characters, I tried to imagine how Ginger’s designer would have designed them. (We know who designed some of the Filmotype fonts, but not Ginger. Over the years many of the records of who did what were lost.)
Like all the new Filmotype revivals (available from Font Bros), Ginger has been remastered to high standards and is a modern font in every way. It is available in OpenType format, which means you can use the same font on either Mac or PC, and includes many OpenType goodies, such as an alternate lowercase “a”, arbitrary fractions, case-sensitive forms, and extensive language support.
Zanzibar is the second Filmotype font I’ve digitized. (The first was Glenlake.) At first glance, I didn’t think much of it. But when I started looking more closely, I realized I’d never seen anything quite like it and decided I needed to do it.
That “Zanzibar” is nearly an anagram of “bizarre” seems fitting. The surviving people from Filmotype (later Alphatype) have not been able to tell us who designed this gem, so we have no record of the designer’s intentions. Released in the early 1950s, it seems somewhat inspired by the work of Lucian Bernhard (Bernhard Tango, 1934) and Imre Reiner (Stradivarius, 1945). At first, it appears to be a formal script, but there are no connecting strokes. It would be better described as a stylized italic, similar to Bodoni Condensed Italic or Onyx Italic, with swash capitals.
About those capitals: If they were plans for roller coaster tracks, they would either be unsafe or very exciting to ride. I have rarely seen such a whimsical combination of spirals and angles. Perhaps the happy result of one too many martinis?
The overall effect—a mix of hairlines, swelling strokes, and dots—reminds me of musical notation. I kept this in mind as I filled out the missing characters. Film font designers had it easy. The original design included only caps, lowercase, numbers, and a minimal set of punctuation and currency symbols—about 70 characters. The digital version contains over 400 characters, including support for most Latin-based languages, math symbols (you never know), user-defined fractions (OpenType support required), and all the usual characters you expect in a modern font.
I also added a few alternate characters to address a design flaw in the original. The lowercase b, h, and k all have a little hook at the top that goes to the left. Unfortunately, when one of these characters follows an f or l, it causes an unsightly collision. Moving them apart only makes it worse. To address this, I created hookless versions of all three that come into play automatically when you enable the OpenType Contextual Alternates feature in your layout or graphics program.
When I was asked in 2014 by Bill Moran, artistic director of the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, to come up with an original wood type design for The Hamilton Wood Type Legacy Project, I wanted to do something that would take advantage of the unique properties of wood type, but also something that hadn’t been done before.
One thing I’d never seen was a monospaced or fixed-width wood typeface, and I thought this could be an interesting idea. But then I thought, what if the characters were not only the same width, but square? That way, the characters could be arranged vertically or horizontally and in any orientation. To a traditional letterpress job printer, a font like this wouldn’t make much sense. But to a modern letterpress printer, who tends to be more interested in self-expression and artistic effects, it could be an unusual and creative design element.
The result is HWT Konop.
For the letterforms themselves, I decided to use a bold gothic style, reminiscent of gothic wood types but more geometric. Since the characters are meant to be used in any orientation, I set aside some of the usual optical adjustments, such as making verticals thicker than horizontals and making tops smaller than bottoms. This, combined with the distortions needed to get all the characters to fit into squares, results in a quirky but (I hope) charming design.
To provide more design options, I came up with a modular system consisting of three sizes: 12-line, 8-line, and 6-line. These three sizes can be used together like Lego® bricks, with endless arrangements possible. The sidebearings match so that characters always align when the three sizes are used together.
The digital version of Konop replicates the wood type version as much as possible, including the three different size designs. It includes OpenType stylistic sets that allow most characters to be rotated in place, 90° left, 90° right, or 180°, just like the wood type version. I also includes extra characters not available in the wood type version.
Even so, since Konop was designed primarily with wood type in mind, it’s actually simpler and more fun to work with the wood type version than the digital version, if you don’t mind getting your hands dirty.
Production on the wood type version is just getting under way. Sample characters were cut last weekend at the Hamilton Wayzgoose by Georgie Brylski Liesch on the pantographic cutter (above) with hand trimming by David Carpenter (below).
The photo below shows the finished 12-line pieces they cut, with the patterns behind them. The patterns are traced with a guide on the pantograph and a high-speed router cuts the type. The size depends on how the pantograph is set up, but it’s always smaller than the pattern to get the best accuracy. Inside corners and small details are cut by hand.
Here it is (below) on a proofing press along with the first proofs. (The right side on the K isn’t quite right, but the finished fonts will be correct.)
I’m not sure how soon the wood type version will be available for purchase, but you can get the digital version now from P22.
You can read more about HWT Konop here.
(Photos of Georgie, David, and the finished pieces by Bill Moran.)