Story of fonts: Interview with Museo font designers

Document directory

• Can you talk about yourself?
• How can I design Museo fonts?
• Can you tell us some design stories?
• Why do you think people like this font? What makes it different?
• Will you scale the font and add more fonts?
• Why do you use numbers, such as 100,300, instead of bold and extra bold?
• Why are some fonts available for free?
• What are you doing now?
• Postscript
• Additional reading

In the web design field in 2008, a brand-new font Museo quickly gained the favor of many designers, and jumped into the column of myfonts.com's 10-year font in 2008. The name of the font designerJos buivenga,Webdesigner depot recently interviewed him about the font design process and its influence in the design field.

Can you talk about yourself?

I was born in 1965 and now lives in Arnhem, the Netherlands. I work for 4 days a week at an advertising company. I was interested in designing fonts for 15 years. At that time, I used my first Mac machine to play Quark Xpress. I often wondered when I could use my own design font to orchestrate a piece of text.

So my first set of fonts delicious surfaced. Every Friday (and countless weekends), I devoted myself to the font design, and every font design was a process of forgetting.

Jos buivenga

How can I design Museo fonts?

Museo is a source of self-love for a letter, the letter is u, I sometimes see the illusion of this letter, a U, its two endpoints bend outward extension.

Jos buivenga's Museo

 

Can you tell us some design stories?

The Museo design does not take a lot of twists and turns. Museo looks like some broken wires. I make the strokes as gentle as possible and make the letter shape as simple as possible.

Because the strokes are thick, And I want Museo to be a relatively coarse font, it is difficult to implement very thick lowercase letters. This is why Museo only has uppercase letters at the beginning. Thanks to my blog, Museo has received a lot of attention since the beginning. People want me to provide the Museo lower-case version.

To this end, I had to make some concessions on the design of strokes. Later I felt that if I had to make some design changes, it would be impossible.

My studio

I planned 5 for Museo
Font. At first, I wanted to calculate their roughness in a linear way. At the beginning, I designed three types of medium bold. In general, I found that the differences (100-300) between different levels of fine bodies are different
The difference between the bold lines (700-900) is large, so I decided to manually adjust their roughness and rely on the naked eye for judgment.

I made a new measurement and re-computed it to generate different fonts with these values, and finally found that the changes between different bold types were not linear, but parabolic.

Museo was initially designed as a display font, and I tried to make it look more harmonious in reality.

Why do you think people like this font? What makes it different?

This is a secret. Oh no, you're kidding me. I want to know it, but I really don't know.

Will you scale the font and add more fonts?

No plan, but I plan to design a Museo sans circle.

Why do you use numbers, such as 100,300, instead of bold and extra bold?

When fontlab measures the font, It is originally displayed as a number. For other titles, I guess it is called by some programs.

I like numbers, so numbers are used to represent their types. That is why I name them between 100 and 900. I have a strange idea. If you name your font with a number, people will be more happy to collect the font.

Why are some fonts available for free?

In the beginning, I plan to sell some Museo fonts, because I worked four days a day and wanted to compensate me for the loss of time in this way. I tried to earn income through donation, but it was not good because everything I did was free before that, and I decided to launch more free fonts.

When Museo is about to be released, my website is a large number of independent visitors every month. I don't want people who know me through my free fonts to leave. This is a gamble, many of my friends think that I am crazy, especially when they know that I will release the most commonly used fonts (300,500,700) for free.

 

What are you doing now?

I am working hard on calluna and calluna sans fonts. At the same time, we are working on questa and the Museo sans circle mentioned above.

Museo sans rounded-in development

 

Online Museo Fonts

Postscript

Jos buivenga has its own font company called exljbris. He also has a personal font blog. All fonts he designed can be purchased at myfonts.com. Museo has five types of fonts, three of which are free of charge and can be downloaded from myfonts.com. Museo sans has 10 types of fonts, two of which are free of charge.

: Museo | Museo sans

Additional reading

The story of fonts: Arial is everywhere

International Source: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/04/meet-jos-buivenga-the-designer-of-the-museo-font/
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