Proxima Nova Family is a typeface idea I’ve been working on in Features various forms since 1981. I originally called it Zanzibar, just because I liked the word. It was nothing more than rough sketches back then, but the concept for the lowercase was quite similar to
how it eventually turned out. The caps came later. ♦ In 1991, I was art director of Business Ethics magazine, where I was using Gill Sans. I liked it, but wished for something a bit plainer and more modern that still had a geometric feel. Such a face did not seem to exist. Starting from my old Zanzibar idea, I began working on a new typeface to fill this void. I came up with the name Visigothic, since it was modeled somewhat on American “gothic” faces. ⊲ Some existing faces influenced the look of Visigothic. I wanted the general proportions and stroke contrast of Helvetica or Akzidenz Grotesk, but with construction and details borrowed variously from Futura, Kabel, the aTF gothics (Copperplate Gothic, News Gothic, Franklin Gothic, etc.) and the U.S. Federal Highway sig- nage typeface. The result was a hybrid; a face combining modern, even-width proportions with a somewhat geometric appearance. ★ I released it through FontHaus in 1994 as Proxima Sans, a fam- ily of six fonts—Regular, Medium, and Black with matching italics. I dropped the name Visigothic, first because of its similarity to the name of another recently released font, Visigoth, and, second, it was kind of a bad pun. I chose the name Proxima Sans because the distinctive characteristics of the design. ● I had plans to do more weights, small caps, a condensed version, and other ideas. But between lackluster sales, becoming a new parent, and taking on a new full-time job, I found I didn’t have the time or energy to continue working on it for a while. ⊲ By the early 2000s, I started to get requests to expand the Proxima Sans family and Rolling Stone magazine chose it as part of its redesign in 2003. Encouraged by all this, I went back to work on a new Proxima Sans family even more ambitious than what I had originally planned. ♦ In 2005, I re-released it as Proxima Nova, a family of 42 fonts— seven weights and three widths with matching italics. Built from the start with the OpenType format in mind, it featured advanced typographic features like small caps, different figure styles, frac- tions, and alternate characters, enough to take on the most de- manding typographic applications. ● Proxima Nova contained other improvements over the original. I reviewed and refined ev- ery character. I rebuilt the italics from scratch. I redid the hinting for better on-screen display. The character set grew from 245 up to 699 characters (1115 with the latest version). I kept the special characters from the original, like the arrows and other dingbats, but gave them proper Unicode values, and created proper math symbols in the positions they’d previously occupied. I scrapped and rebuilt the spacing and kerning. As in Proxima Sans, the italics have been optically adjusted to eliminate the distortion caused by simply slanting the letters—true italics, not simple obliques. ⊲ It’s now been over ten years since I first released Proxima Nova. Since then, I’ve continued to make improvements and enhancements, such as additional language support, including Vietnamese, Cyrillic and Greek, and have added a new weight—Medium—bringing the total number of fonts in the family to 48. ■ —Mark Simonson
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