Benicia
A creative blend of typographic influences.
Designed by Jim Parkinson
Story
In the mid-1970s, Roger Black and I worked on making a font family for Rolling Stone® magazine. It was largely based on ATF Jenson, which has a mechanical, geometric edge to it. When Bodoni’s typefaces were reinterpreted for the industrial age, they lost much of their beauty and became stiff and mechanical, similar to what happened when Nicholas Jenson’s type became ATF Jenson. Maybe the mechanical look was in vogue at the time these types were made but things that are in vogue don’t always stay that way — like bell bottoms, mood rings and pet rocks. The Rolling Stone fonts were my first encounter with ATF Jenson, which I was completely ignorant about until Roger mentioned the name.
About 20 years later, I drew Benicia, with two decades under my belt of learning how to draw fonts and understanding that it was more than just a geometry project. I always felt that the Rolling Stone typefaces were infected with shadows of the Rolling Stone logo. I was working on both at the same time. I tried to make Benicia less rigid, less mechanical and less Rolling Stone-y. I wanted to move a bit from ATF Jenson toward original Jenson, but not too far.
Benicia is a small town on the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay. In 1853 it served as California’s first capital.
Features
Additional features include: Fractions, Superscript, and Ordinals.
Glyphs
Basic Latin 94
Latin-1 Supplement 95
Latin Extended-A 10
Latin Extended-B 1
Spacing Modifier Letters 8
Combining Diacritical Marks 13
Greek and Coptic 3
General Punctuation 16
Currency Symbols 1
Letterlike Symbols 2
Mathematical Operators 12
Geometric Shapes 1
Alphabetic Presentation Forms 2