Modesto Text®
Inspired by classic signpainter letterforms.
Designed by Jim Parkinson
Story
As a hand-lettering artist in the decades before personal computers, Jim Parkinson was challenged to learn many different lettering styles for dozens of applications, such as: packaging, book covers, advertising, and more. All of his sketches were done on tracing paper and he saved them in a cardboard box under his desk. When he needed inspiration, he would rifle through that old box of sketches. Over the years, he had favored one lettering style more often than all the others that was used by lettering artists and sign painters for decades. That style was very versatile and it later became the basis for Modesto.
When he began using Fontographer, Jim digitized several variations of this style and eventually had developed a small family of six fonts. The family grew over the years and Jim named the fonts after Modesto, the central California farming community where his mother grew up.
Modesto is based on a sign painters lettering style popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The first Modesto fonts were released in 2000 with just two styles: Regular and Expanded, built from the “Blue Plate” font Jim created for the San Francisco Chronicle. Italics were added in 2014.
The Modesto Text family is a text face in name only, called that simply because it has a lowercase and to distinguish it from the rest of the Modesto styles.
Features
Additional features include: Localized Forms, Numerators, Denominators, Superscript, Subscript, Scientific Inferiors, and Ordinals.
Variable Font Features
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Glyphs
Basic Latin 94
Latin-1 Supplement 95
Latin Extended-A 127
Latin Extended-B 87
IPA Extensions 27
Spacing Modifier Letters 15
Combining Diacritical Marks 30
Greek and Coptic 6
Latin Extended Additional 163
General Punctuation 17
Currency Symbols 14
Letterlike Symbols 2
Mathematical Operators 12
Geometric Shapes 2
Alphabetic Presentation Forms 4
Latin Extended-C 4
Latin Extended-D 4
Additional Glyphs 34
Modesto Text supports 343 languages. View our language support page to see which.