This week I discovered Huronia (review, PDF specimen, in use) and am quite in love. However, the font has been unavailable for sale for a couple of years now: the foundry is “remastering” the font, and when I asked, they declined to speculate when they might be done.
(I’ve asked politely about buying a license for the original version, and they are considering it. Meanwhile, I can’t stop thinking about it…)
Questions:
Have you ever been smitten by a font you couldn’t have? Or, conversely, have you ever managed to (legally) acquire use of a font that was difficult to track down or obtain?
Does anyone know of other text fonts with qualities similar to Huronia’s?
Huronia includes many characters of pan-American languages. The designer of this font is William Ross Mills. He is also the author of Plantagenet, a font that includes many characters of pan-American languages. I think that if you aren’t able to get Huronia, you can use Plantagenet. There’s a new version called Plantagenet Novus, but it seems that the type foundry is remastering the font so it is also not avalaible for purchase yet.
As for fonts that include pan-American characters and match properly with pan-European languages made by other fonts designers, Bringhurst recommends the excellent Lucida Sans and Times New Roman (The Elements of Typographic Style, p. 116).
I remember searching once for Margaret Seaworthy Gothic, the font designed by conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner (samples), and it didn’t seem like it had ever been commercially available. After reading your post I just googled again, and found this:
I’m not a font person, so would be curious if that looks legit to others here. Hard to imagine that Weiner’s estate would now be licensing it out.
(Also curious how unique/original Weiner’s font was to begin with. He referenced Franklin Gothic Compressed in interviews, but I don’t know what other close influences would have been in use back then.)
I have an example of a free-ish font fitting the first question.
I love dumpster-diving for old common fonts to play with, so I can spend money instead on newer fonts like MB recommended. URW++ is a treasure trove for them, they donated a lot of their fonts to the Ghostscript project, including their version of Univers. According to Wikipedia, they donated it “under the series name U001, and then as URW Classic Sans under the Aladdin Free Public License.”
I found U001, it’s not easy to find but not difficult either. “URW Classic Sans” on the other hand was just impossible. I could find sites talking about it, and lots of downloads for “URW Classico” (completely different font), but nothing for downloading it.
After a few weeks of intermittent searching, I clicked on a page for an NPM package and it led me to a git repo for Ghostcript. There it is! The only place on the internet you can get it, basically. I’m still comparing it and U001 for differences.
Still, this is all way better than shoveling over $400 to Monotype for a century-old font I’m never going to use for anything serious.
In addition to MB’s wonderful fonts, I’ve found two sources of great work for the font enthusiasts:
First: FutureFonts.xyz — you buy fonts in progress with prices usually matching how far along the font is. Bonus: you can provide feedback while the font is being developed and help support its eventual release. A couple of my favorites:
VCTR Mono - very nice mono inspired by the text on SLR cameras. As I recall I bought this when it was 1 family for about $15.
Second: David Jonathan Ross’s Font of the Month Club. For $6 a month, you get a font and can buy past releases for a similarly nominal sum. These are amazing fonts. Among the gems for those focused on longer form writing: