Courier is a zine by Katarzyna Wenda tells the story of the Courier typeface and describes its origins, shows off its form and compares it to New Times Roman. This zine uses the type in different was for illustration most being done with repetition of the typeface overlapping each other. The thing I like most about this zine is that it really puts an emphasis on the type and type illustrations by having the zine in only black and white so that nothing distracts from the type.   

Sci-fi Films throughout the decades is a zine by LEGI that shows off fonts used for sci-fi films and how we have envisioned the future through fonts. One of the main features of this zine is how text is used to create images which I really like. I also really like the colour pallet used although I do not understand why the "ARRIVAL" pages are don't follow this colour pallet. I really don't like the covers and the second and third pages this is because the text blends into the page, especially when it is compared to the the ret of the zine.

Wenda, K. (2022). Courier | Typographic zine. Behance. https://www.behance.net/gallery/150120353/Courier-Typographic-zine

Leonforte, N. (2021). Cooper Black - Typographic Zine. Behance. https://www.behance.net/gallery/121408827/Cooper-Black-Typographic-Zine

LEGI. (2021). Typographic Zine | Sci-fi Films throughout the. Behance. decadeshttps://www.behance.net/gallery/121412795/Typographic-Zine-Sci-fi-Films-throughout-the-decades

Chosen Typeface: Proxima Nova

Proxima nova is a geometric-grotesque sans-serif typeface and has been described as being a hybrid of Futura and Akzidenz Grotesk with its combination of geometric appearance and modern proportions. The Proxima Nova font family has been updated a lot since it was first released, originally containing 42 fonts but now has 80 with 1453 characters. Proxima Nova has 5 widths with 8 weights and italics for all widths and weights. The features Proxima Nova also includes are small caps, case-sensitive characters, alternate characters, fraction support, ordinal support, ligatures, proportional and tabular figures, extended language support, extended currency support and dingbats. All these features make Proxima Nova a very versatile and feature rich font family

(Typewolf, n.d.) (Simonson, n.d.) (Simonson, 2017)

Design process: 

Proxima Nova is a font created by Mark Simonson which he has started working on in various forms since 1981 having 3 different names before becoming Proxima Nova. Starting off with the name Zanzibar which were just rough sketches and the lowercase letters he drew for this ended up being quite similar to how it turned out in the end. The second iteration was called Visigothic which came from wanting to to make a more modern and plainer typeface maintaining the geometric feel. For this typeface he was influenced by other existing typefaces wanting to create the typeface with proportions and stroke contrast inspired by Helvetica or Akzidenz Grotesk with construction and details borrowing from Futura, Kabel, the ATF gothics and the U.S. Federal Highway signage typeface. Which then was released in 1994 with the name Proxima Sans. With Proxima Sans Mark Simonson had planned to do more weights, small caps, a condensed version, and other ideas but because of lackluster sales and things going on in his life he stopped working on the font. Simonson later returned to the work on Proxima Sans after being encouraged by people requesting for the font to be expanded and Rolling Stone magazine choosing it as a part of its redesign, renaming it and releasing it as Proxima Nova in 2005.

(Simonson, 2017)​​​​​​​

Proxima Nova is a very popular font for a reason and this is because of the fonts versatility. The font is very simple and clear which makes it so it can fit in many contexts and doesn’t bring much attention to itself. Proxima Nova’s simplicity and clarity also makes the font effective for being used on screens of different sizes and resolutions. What makes the font so popular and versatile is its biggest strength but also creates its weakness because this makes the font less interesting, less noticeable and makes it so it doesn’t have much personality. This makes the font a bad fit for contexts where the text needs to convey a lot of personality and style.   

(Vo, 2015)

Mark Simonson is an independent type designer most famous for creating Proxima Nova. He was born in Wisconsin, United states in 1955 and grew up in a small city called Beloit. He is mostly self-taught at designing type and learnt by reading about it, looking at what others have done and by practicing it. He had been interested in typefaces from a young age and one of his big influences was his uncle Knut who was a graphic designer and was the one who introduced Simonson to the idea of being a graphic designer as a job. Simonson went to Northampton Community College and joined the 2-year commercial art program where he learned graphic design and other art skills but did not end up finishing it and instead got his first job in a small advertising art studio called Hestern Blessing where he would design advertising and brochures. Simonson had many graphic design jobs after this which allowed him to work a lot with type and  released his first font Felt Tip Roman in 1992.

Mark Simonson is an independent type designer and because of this he does not work anywhere grand or special. He works by himself in his studio which is a repurposed bedroom in a 1920s-era bungalow in Saint Anthony Park, Minnesota. In this studio he has everything he needs to create type the main things being his computer iPads and his drawing table. He also has a cabinet that contains sketches, reference material and test prints of every typeface he has worked on including the unfinished ones. His posters that he has hung up above his desk and a bookshelf full of typography and design books show his love and passion for type.

"I never really decided to become a full time type designer. I had hoped it would happen, but I really didn’t expect it to."

"I’ve been thinking about letters and drawing letters and drawing letters for as long as I can remember. not as much as building blocks of language, but for the particular and peculiar forms they take on in the physical world. ” 

” Something else that goes way back for me is an almost synesthetic feeling about letters, that they have distinct attitudes and personalities, as if each letter is like a face."

(My Fonts, 2009) (Simonson, n.d.) (Type@Cooper, 2020) (Adobe Fonts n.d.)

The x-height is the distance between the baseline and the mean line which determines the height of lowercase letters. X-height is a big factor in readability and legibility with large x-heights making the font more readable as long as it is not too large that the distance between the mean line and ascender or cap-height is not made too small. For Proxima Nova, a font made to be very readable the x-height is very important and to be readable the font has a large x-height.   

(Sparx 2021)

The most impactful decisions I made when designing this zine were the colours, grid, fonts, text alignment and text sizes. For the colours I have chosen to use black, white and a bright pink. The reason why I chose to use these colours with black being used as the background colour is so that the text really stands out since the zine is about the fonts, so I wanted them to be the focus. This relates to my choice in fonts where I chose to use Proxima Nova Regular and Proxima Nova Black. I decided to use fonts from the Proxima Nova font family because it shows off the font, some of its versatility and they work well together. The grid and font size were important because these things were the biggest factors that effected the layout of the zine. I chose a 11pt font size for the body text so that the amount of text could fill enough of the pages with the amount of text I had written. For the text alignment I chose centre alignment which was influenced by the previous decisions I made to make it work best, and I didn’t justify the text to avoid large spacing between words, it made the text look too boxy, and I found it more readable.

I have learnt a lot from making this zine. I found that there are so many things you need to think about and so many decisions that need to be made when making a zine. I have also improved a lot at using InDesign and have gained a little more experience with using Photoshop. The main thing that I have taken away from this is how helpful and impactful using grids are when designing. They guide your design making it more consistent and make placement decisions much easier. 

Some of the challenges I ran into were that I found it difficult to figure out what I could do to fill out all the pages of the zine and make sure that the pages were not too overcrowded or empty and create a balance in the use of space. Although I found using a grid very helpful, I also found that putting things in the grid and following the rules, created by the previous pages like the body font size, limited me in some ways making it harder to layout the pages and fit things in nicely. 

I think that one of the ways I succeeded in, with my design process, was that I wrote down most of the text before I started designing my zine and its layout. This made it much easier to plan what I was going to do and make decisions for my zine that would work best with the amount of text I had. I also think that my choice of colours was a big success because it worked well for what I was going for, making the text stand out.

I think that this zine has been successful overall, and I like a lot of things about it, but I think that this zine could be improved in many ways and for some pages I think they work better than others. I find that there is always ways that I could improve through further iteration and experimentation but that comes with having deadlines. If I could have done something different, it would be that I would get more feedback. I only got a small amount of feedback and I think that getting the opinions of others and letting them critique this zine could have helped a lot in improving it and making it the best it could be. 

Adobe Fonts. (n.d.). Mark Simonson. https://fonts.adobe.com/designers/mark-simonson

Busche, L. (2022). Introducing Mark Simonson, Creator of Proxima Nova. Brush Up.

https://creativemarket.com/blog/introducing-mark-simonson-studio

Cousins, C. (2022). 25+ Typography Trends for 2023. Design Shack. https://designshack.net/articles/typography/typography-trends-2018/

Sparx. (2021). The Relationship Between Type and Branding. https://sparxpg.com/blog/the-story-behind-our-font-proxima-nova/

Typewolf. (n.d.). Proxima Nova. https://www.typewolf.com/proxima-nova#:~:text=Released%20in%202005%2C%20Proxima%20Nova,geometric%20appearance%20with%20modern%20proportions.

Type@Cooper. (2020, May 27). How I Became a Type Designer in Only 30 Years with Mark Simonson [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/423177901

My zine will be about the typeface Proxima Nova and its creator, Mark Simonson. I have chosen this typeface because I like how clean and simple it looks and for other fonts, I found I couldn't find much information on them and their creator. Below is a thumbnail sketch I have drawn with the page order and possible layout of the zine. With the zine I want to put emphasis on the text which will be done in Proxima Nova font since the zine is about Proxima Nova. Proxima Nova is a typeface that is made not be distracting or stand out which is why I have used layout and colour to make the text and the typefaces forms stand out more.