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 -- Ben Weiner | http://readingtype.org.uk/about/contact.html +44 (0) 7780 608 659
