February 2015 Giveaway - Nouveau Gothic Rounded Outlined Font

[Barbara B]

February 2015 — Nouveau Gothic Rounded Outlined Font



Although you probably wanted more textures this month (!?), for a change of pace, Gary created Nouveau Gothic Rounded Outline especially for Xarists who hang out on the Xone. Unlike other Art Nouveau typefaces, Nouveau Gothic has no hint of Roman flourishes—it’s like Avant Garde banged into Arnold Boeklin and nobody knows who won. Available in both TrueType and OpenType, Nouveau Gothic has no punctuation or foreign characters, but the lowercase is true Small Caps and it makes a swell headline in Xara.

Get it now and show us some typography and layout that looks like it was from the turn of the century -- the Twentieth Century that is.

[wizard509]

Very nice font. Thank you Gare.

[Gare]

Thanks, Larry.

I was hankering to get back to designing fonts, and I realized that all the really good designs were taken, and 90% of the fonts we find on the web are retreads of existing ones.

But no one has tried making an Art Nouveau font, always Roman in style, into a Gothic font, where the stems are all of equal weight.

Whether this will be a hit or not remains to be seen, but just for everyone's information, if you use this as a headline font, both Lydian and Albertus seem to work well with it.

If anyone else finds a body text font that works well with Nouveau Gothic, please chime in here!

My Best,

Gary

[stygg2003]

Great font Gary and thank you. I had a look at Lydian and Albertus at My Fonts but they will have to wait until I put some money in the piggy bank I tried a couple of sites where both fonts were free but soon as I clicked on download, my anti-virus kicked in and quarantined a Win32:Evo-gen (Susp) so if my anti-virus did'nt like it I'm sure my comp. would'nt. Will buy the real thing shortly. Be careful out there people.

[mwenz]

If anyone else finds a body text font that works well with Nouveau Gothic, please chime in here!

I think that in a poster, a book cover--something that is by nature graphical--most any font would work well with this as the main heading. I would tend to use either something like Franklin Gothic or heavier weight of Helvetica (probably condensed), at least as subordinate copy with your font (thanks, BTW). Longer bits of text I wouldn't be afraid of using Caslon or the ilk.

[angelize]

very nice font! Thanks Gary

[Boy]

That's a very nice and generous give-away, Gare. Thanks so much!

[Gare]

@Boy—

You're most welcome. Enjoy!

@Frances—

Needs contrast, and you're welcome!

@stygg—

I will not mention here the names of sites that I'm fairly sure are pirate or just plain malware sites. I don't want to be the one responsible for leading someone to such a den of inequity even though I say, "no, noooo.!"

However, stygg, places such as 1001fonts.com are legit, as is fontSquirrel, the only caveat being these free fonts aren't allowed to go online with paying a fee.

Sad to say that getting headline fonts for free is a zillion times easier than getting a good working set of body text fonts. Hint, although pushing it here: if you ever see a copy of CorelDRAW 4,5, or 6 (not X6, or X5, just plain 5 or 6 from the 20th century) for less than $50, buy it for the typefaces.

I just looked for all of 30 seconds and found a box edition for $99, a little on the steep side. Here's the deal; in about 1996 or so, Corel licensed the entire (or what seemed to be the entire) Bitstream typeface catalogue. That ain't going to happen again because Monotype bought Bitstream and all their assets a little more than a year ago.

In addition to classic must-have head faces such as Balloon and Mona Lisa Recut, there's also a tone of font families included in the software. Examples? No less than 14 family members of Futura and 17 of Helvetica. Those are headline fonts, but as far as Roman, body copy fonts go, they have these two in just the top half of browsing the "B" sections.



If I ever get the time, I'll try to devote a month's video to Typography, because it is very difficult to describe the "feeling" of a passage of text cast in a good body copy typeface. There are nuances, and subtleties, density. It's almost as though when you use a headline font to express a thought, it's speaking very unambiguously in your native language, let's say English for example. But when you set body copy in a particular font style, it's like a dialect of the same language. This is not a great example, but when you set body copy in Trump Medieval, it's almost as though you're addressing someone in English (U.K.); while using Bookman of Century Roman "feel" as though they are home-grown US fonts and corresponding thoughts.

@Mike—

In complete agreement here. I finally got my complete ITC Franklin Gothic set together, cobbled from different sources over the years and I love it. I had to use FontLab to make the character heights all consistent.

Franklin Gothic has a soft authoritarian feel to it; it's no mistake the Infernal Revenue Service uses this font on our paperwork. Interesting that the IRS never told the chief designer not to mix Helvetica with Franklin Gothic—the combination is the typesetter's equivalent to root canal work.

I will sometimes wander off into Frutiger and Frutiger Neue, Formata from the Berthold collection, and DAX when Franklin doesn't feel quiter right for a subhead.

TIP: Condensed bold or black sans serif fonts rock for subheadlines and authoritative statements and because condensed fonts get you more words per line.

-g

[mwenz]

A quickie use of the Nouveau font.

Mike

[Gare]

Wow, Mike...you know, in this treatment you did, the font has lost most of its "Nouveau-ness" and looks a lot hipper than I intended it to be!

Amazing what context does for you.

-g