When I released Metallophile Sp 8 in 2003, the plan was to add more weights eventually. Now that I am converting my older fonts to OpenType format, that time has come. These four fonts should be available soon from my usual distributors. More details to come. More weights later this year.

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.

I released the Light and Light Italic styles of Metallophile Sp8 in 2003. The original plan was to add more weights later, but later never seemed to come. When I started getting requests from customers for more weights, I realized that had to change.

And now it has. Introducing Metallophile Sp8 Medium and Medium Italic. These, like the original Metallophile Sp8 fonts, are based on a classic sans serif hot metal face, Spartan, set at 8 points.

My concept was based on the observation that digital versions of classic typefaces look quite different from their counterparts in metal type. The metal faces, printed on plate-finish paper using letterpress printing, had a warmth and texture that was lost in the precise mathematical world of digital typography. It was not only the imperfections of ink on cast metal, it was also the proportions and spacing, which were particular to the size of type. In digital type (with some exceptions), one size fits all. In metal type, every size was custom tailored. 8 point digital Futura looks quite different than 8 point metal Futura, especially in print.

There have been some attempts in digital type at simulating the look of classic metal typefaces, such as ITC Founder’s Caslon, but rarely has it been tried with more modern sans serifs. Metallophile Sp8 Light was an attempt, but without more weights it was limited in its usefulness.

The original metal Spartan Light was paired (or “duplexed”) with Medium as a boldface on the old Linotype casting machines. With that in mind, I decided Metallophile Sp8 Medium would be the best boldface for Metalophile Sp8 Light.

As part of this process, the entire family was moved to the OpenType format, with a greatly enlarged character set, including extensive language support, a full set of math characters (based on the standard “pi” sorts of the metal type days), f-ligatures, a large set of pre-built fractions as well as arbitrary fractions via OpenType. The new fonts also include and alternate two-story lowercase “a” and alternate left quote marks, just like the original metal face. I redesigned the “ß” to give it the more traditional form, but included the more contemporary version I did in the original Metallophile Sp8 fonts as an alternate.

More weights are already in the works, which I hope to release this Summer, but I wanted to get these out as soon as they were ready.

Metallophile Sp8 Specimen

Metallophile Sp8 User Guide

You could say I’m a Tim Burton fan. I’ve written elsewhere about some of the typographic anachronisms in his film Ed Wood, but I also think the titles in that film are wonderfully, typographically evocative—pitch perfect for the period in which the film is set. For a long time, though, I couldn’t figure out what the bold, condensed sans serif typeface was that they used in the titles.

I’m not easily stumped identifying typefaces, but this was one of only two times I’ve posted a query to the Typophile Type ID Board. In the end, I found it myself: Glenlake. (After I found it, I wondered if the Ed Wood title designers chose it because of the name—as in Ed Wood’s film Glen or Glenda… Could be.)

Still, Glenlake was something of a mystery. It popped up here and there in old film font catalogs, sometimes with a different name, but where did it come from? The more I looked at it, the more distinctive it seemed… a kind of Fifties precursor of Compacta or Helvetica Compressed (both Sixties designs).

So last year, when Stuart Sandler invited me to help digitize the classic Filmotype library, and I saw Glenlake was part of the library, I had to say yes. There are more of these funky/cool Filmotype faces to come—perhaps even more weights of Glenlake (it had only one)—including some really cool scripts that I’m working on.

Above: One of the original Filmotype film font machines.

Of course, the old Filmotype fonts were made mostly in the Fifties, and they pretty much only did the basic character set—caps, lowercase, numbers, and some punctuation. The digital version is being released in the oh-so-modern OpenType format and includes a complete, modern character complement, suitable for setting type in most Latin-based languages. I even threw in alternate designs for the “a” and “y”—something that didn’t exist in the original Glenlake design, but was common in Filmotype’s other sans serif fonts.

So, there you have it. Filmotype Glenlake, a digital revival of a classic Filmotype font from the Fifties, available for online purchase from Font Bros. I think it’s a heck of a font, and one that I’m proud to have helped bring back from obscurity. (Be sure to check out the other new release, Filmotype MacBeth, a bouncy, casual serif design.)

The new release of Proxima Nova features a couple of compatibility fixes and more flexible access to alternate characters.

As a side benefit of one of the fixes, the Normal, Condensed, and Extra Condensed styles appear in their own font submenus. This turns out to be a better arrangement than having the whole family all in one submenu. I should have done it this way in the first place.

Alternate characters will now be much easier to deal with. I’ve set up seven “Stylistic Sets” so that alternate characters may be substituted globally in any combination. The new sets are also smarter the the original two in the way they handle the two-story and one-story lowercase “a” in the roman and italic. Again, I should have done it this way in the first place.

The update is free to customers who purchased before December 14, 2005. Customers who purchased after December 14, 2005 already have the new version.

Proxima Nova is now up to version 1.2 with a couple of new features:

• It now includes supplemental fonts (in OpenType format) containing small caps/old style figures (ScOsf) and alternate characters (Alt) in place of the normal lowercase, figures, etc. This allows programs that don’t yet have proper OpenType support (Flash, Word, etc.) to access small caps, old style figures and alternate characters.

• Previously unencoded glyphs have been encoded (private use area) to make it easier to access glyphs via Unicode in situations where OpenType feature support is lacking.

Customers needing either of these new features who purchased Proxima Nova licenses from my site (www.ms-studio.com) may contact me at mark@marksimonson.com for a free upgrade. Please include your DigiBuy order number.