Proxima Nova is now up to version 1.2 with a couple of new features:
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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.
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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.
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I’m proud to announce the release of two new display fonts: Kinescope and Snicker. Both fonts were inspired by hand-lettered titles in the old Fleischer Brothers’ animated Superman cartoons from the 1940s.
Kinescope uses advanced OpenType magic to choose the most pleasing character shapes as you type and features extended language support. (An application with advanced OpenType support required for the magic stuff.) To find out more, check out the Kinescope User Guide (1.6mb PDF).
Advanced OpenType support is not required by Snicker, but it has some tricks up its sleeve, including case-sensitive punctuation, automatic fractions, and extended language support. To find out more, check out the Snicker User Guide (1.2mb PDF).
For the first month, Kinescope and Snicker will be available as low as $29 each exclusively from Font Bros. Follow these links for more details:
June 1 Update: Kinescope and Snicker are now available here at Mark Simonson Studio as well.
Well, here it is the beginning of March and those three new fonts I wrote about in December are still not out. A few people have written me about this, so I should explain.
Basically, I keep getting sidetracked by client work, taking time away from finishing the new fonts. Client work has real deadlines—deadlines I have no control over. My self-imposed deadline for finishing the fonts was, by comparison, more flexible. So when push came to shove, you can imagine what happened.
The good news is that I’m on the case again and it shouldn’t be much longer. I hesitate to give a date except: soon.
Update: Kinescope and Snicker have now been released (April 30, 2007).
As you may be able to tell by my sporadic Notebook postings of late, I’ve been a very busy guy. Some of the things I’ve been working on I can’t talk about (yet).
One of the things I can talk about is three new fonts I will be releasing in the near future. All three were inspired by hand lettered titles in 1940s films.
Kinescope and Snicker are loosely based on title lettering in Fleischer Studio’s animated Superman films from the forties.
In both fonts I’ve ended up with something a bit different than the source of my inspiration, but I think you can see the resemblance.
Kinescope will include context-sensitive characters. For example, when a letter falls at the end of a word, the connecting stroke is clipped off. This gives settings a more natural hand-lettered look. Stylistically, Kinescope falls somewhere between Brush Script and Kaufmann Script, but more elegant than either.
Snicker is a cartoony block letter style. One of the design challenges with Snicker was to come up with a suitable lowercase—the lettering in the Fleischer titles that inspired me only used capitals. Although it is intended for display sizes, it works pretty well for text. Consequently, I’m toying with the idea of adding a lighter weight and italics. It could perhaps become a typographically interesting alternative to Comic Sans…
The third font, Launderette, is based closely on lettering used in the titles of the 1944 Otto Preminger film, Laura:
This font was originally commissioned by a filmmaker who wanted to use the same “font” in the titles of his own film. As with most films of that time, the titles were hand-lettered by an artist, not typeset.
The challenge with this font was that there were very few characters in the source lettering. Most of the characters had to be created from scratch to match the style of the existing ones. Launderette, like Kinescope, will have context-sensitive characters to give it a custom, hand-lettered look.
I hope to release these new fonts by the end of the year.
Update: Kinescope and Snicker have now been released (April 30, 2007). Unfortunately, the name Landerette was already in use (twice!), so I changed it to Lakeside. Lakeside has also been released (February 7, 2008).
Fellow font guy Stuart Sandler and his partner, Mike Ibach, have launched a new online font venue called Font Bros. The site has some of the same retro look as Stuart’s older Font Diner site, but unlike Font Diner, it offers a hand-picked selection of display faces from a dozen or so independent foundries (including Mark Simonson Studio).
The range of styles covers the whole gamut of type and lettering genres, not just retro. Some of the fonts (like Michael Doret’s amazing Metroscript) are brand new. They are also in the process of remastering the formerly freeware Fontalicious library, bringing it up to professional quality standards.
So, go check it out. It’s pretty cool. www.fontbros.com