Ashley Pond V · “Nebraska” · 25 September 2003 · Acrylic on canvas · 6" x 12" · Seattle, WA. Color match is not perfect.

Wish I’d finished this or that I’d at least designed them all. I might have been able to execute all 72+ to my satisfaction over time. It took the Lady Frieda Harris many years to finish old Alex Crow’s deck after all.

Ashley Pond V · “Married to His Death” · 1995 · Acrylic on canvas, painted with a skinning knife · 8" x 10" · Painted at the Lobo Ranch in Taos, NM. Color match is not perfect.

Sketched from a photo Jeremy took in his room in Hokona at UNM. I’m not dead certain of the year.

Ashley Pond V · Untitled · 13 March 1995 · Acrylic on canvas, painted with a brush and a skinning knife · 8" x 10" · Painted at the Lobo Ranch in Taos, NM. Color match is not perfect.

It’s from ’92? Or so? It’s done pretty directly from a sketch Elisa did.

Romanette is a delicate capital typeface in the Roman/Palatino style. Not original but nicely executed and quite a nice diversion from some of the more well-worn book faces. It’s from 1996 and I’m truly sorry I don’t remember the original work I based it on because it was also an independent fontographer who was doing some nice work I’d like to credit.

Download Romanette TrueType™ font; file is a tar-zipped and should be expandable and useable on PC, *nix, and Macintosh. [update: here is an uncompressed version if the other causes trouble.]

Caveats: the kerning is not terrific right now and it is so light that it doesn’t do well at smaller point sizes. I plan to punch up the weight a bit and manually fix all the iffy kerning but it won’t be soon. There was no Euro in ’96 so there is no «€» in the face yet. It's a single face family. No bold or italic.

Here is a pangram with Romanette and some of its special characters, mostly abbreviation symbols for degrees and addresses.

On a related note—and not merely self-promotion—here is some JavaScript for doing pangrams.

Also, I’d just like to say that I showed great restraint not calling this the Free Font Friday or something.

Had a strange, but pleasant, experience yesterday; fighting back some nostalgia for Renate all of the sudden. Luc Devroye, a CS professor at McGill University in Montreal, wrote up a bit about my typography on his site.

The reason this is strange is I haven’t been much of a typographer in a long time. I haven’t put anything online—except as résumé points—since 1996 at the latest and I think I did most of it in 1995. He linked to one of my fonts, Element, at dafont.com. I didn’t even know it was up there. I put out about 6 of them as shareware on AOL back when they were the only game in town.

I suppose the fonts have migrated around a bit just because there weren’t that many fonts back then. Today there are 10s of thousands of free fonts or rip-offs of licensed fonts available.

I haven’t quit designing them—as you can see—but I haven’t done one digitally since 1998. Right about that time support for my favorite font editor, Fontographer, evaporated. The software was sold around a couple of times and new versions ceased just as Apple was switching OSes—again—and I was leaving the country—again.

My .fog files languished on a Mac 5300 for 8 years. Today I discover that there is a 4.7 Fontographer release which is compatible with OS X. So, looks like I’m back in the font game as soon as I cough up the $99 update fee. Of course now a new Wacom tablet is in order because of Apple’s new hardware standards and nearly total lack of support for their old stuff. Che scemo.

In any case, you can get Element by clicking on its image above and I’ll post more of my typefaces soon and see about rendering some of the new designs digitally.