The good thing about setting a typeface aside is that, when you come back to it, you can see the problems much more clearly. I did some rough preliminary work in 20, but didn't put serious effort into it until last September, after I finished Dreamboat. It was an obvious thing to add and would make the family even more versatile. Condensed and Extra Condensed have been there since the very beginning, but it was missing styles wider than the normal width. One of the ideas on my back burner for a long time has been to add wide styles to Proxima Nova. Introducing Proxima Nova Wide & Extra Wide May 5th, 2023.More information here.įiled Under: Font News, Type Design, Recent Work Viroqua also supports most Latin-based Western and Eastern European languages, plus Vietnamese. Viroqua features many typographical niceties missing from Kandal, such as small caps, old style and lining figures (both proportional and tabular), superscript and subscript figures, fractions, and dingbats. Viroqua also has a wider range of weights, seven in all, going from Thin to Black. I've got three more decades of experience and I hope it shows. The original italic especially suffered from my lack of experience as a type designer. Viroqua is an improvement over Kandal in every way I could think of, while retaining its core design concept: A hybrid combining modern proportions, Jenson-like details, and a bit of slab serif DNA. Nearly every character has been reworked or refined. The new name, "Viroqua", is the town in Southwestern Wisconsin where she was born and raised. "Kandal" was my paternal grandmother's maiden name and the town in Norway her family was from. The new version is reworked from the ground up, so I decided to give it a completely different name, instead of something like Kandal Nova. Thirty years later, it's finally happened. I probably should have pulled it from my library, but I kept thinking I would come back to it and fix it, like I did with Proxima Sans. It's not surprising, given that it was such an early design, made when I had very little experience making fonts. Kandal has never been one of my popular typefaces. I was also working on Proxima Sans, the predecessor to Proxima Nova, around the same time, and a few other ideas, some of which are still on the drawing board. One of my ideas was to revisit Excalibur, simplifying the design and addressing its many flaws. I also got a Mac in 1984 and Fontographer in 1987 and started trying to make PostScript fonts. I never did submit any more typefaces to ITC, but I did have lots of ideas and sketches and practice drawing letters. It had lots of problems and I resolved to improve my knowledge and skills before trying to submit something to them again.įast-forward to 1990. By a large margin. Excalibur was understandably rejected by ITC. I honestly had very little idea what I was doing-a case of overestimating what I knew and underestimating how much was left to know. It went through a couple of iterations before the one I submitted, variously influenced by the work of Hermann Zapf and Jim Parkinson. It's one of my earliest typeface designs, going all the way back to an earlier design in 1978, which I submitted it to International Typeface Corporation (ITC) under the name "Excalibur". Viroqua's ancestor, Excalibur, hand inked. Introducing Viroqua: Kandal Revisited October 24th, 2023.
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