Richmond
A display sans with a rich typographic history.
Designed by Jim Parkinson
Story
Most of the geometric sans fonts and families I had made were customs for various newspapers, so they all tended to be condensed. Newspapers — at least the ones I was working with — were very much into character count for their display faces. Single-column headlines set in wider typefaces can cause a lot of hyphenated words, and each hyphenation threatens to add another line in depth to the headline.
I wanted to try a geometric sans family that had regular widths in roman and italic, supplemented with several condensed weights and several sets of ornamented caps.
During the course of making a half-dozen different geometric sans fonts, I wound up with a head full of ideas. I started from scratch, rather than using the Chronicle Metro or Generica as a foundation.
This newest geometric sans font family is called Richmond, and with 16 fonts it has a lot of versatility. When it was just in development, the Staten Island Advance took a fancy to Richmond, and at one time, the were using it for headlines and display type throughout the news sections. Richmond was released as a Type 1 font. Now it is receiving a few tweaks before being rereleased as OTF. I’m thinking the two lightly ornamented fonts in this family are going the become chromatics.
Glyphs
Basic Latin 94
Latin-1 Supplement 93
Latin Extended-A 84
Latin Extended-B 2
Spacing Modifier Letters 8
Combining Diacritical Marks 13
Greek and Coptic 1
Latin Extended Additional 12
General Punctuation 16
Currency Symbols 1
Letterlike Symbols 2
Mathematical Operators 12
Geometric Shapes 1
Alphabetic Presentation Forms 2
Additional features include: Case-Sensitive Forms, Ordinals, Fractions, and Localized Forms.