Windsor Typeface (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Windsor Typeface (2018)

fontreviewjournal.com

133 pointsJadoJodo23 comments

I don't know much about fonts and typography but just want to acknowledge the huge amount of work that goes into putting together an article like this on something relatively obscure. Enjoyable read!

What happened to Font Review Journal? For a while it was my go-to place for flowery language about minuscule details in letter shapes. Looks like it hasn’t seen an update since before the pandemic. I know at some point Bethany Heck was working on a book version of it, but I can’t find any information about it actually being published.

I developed strong opinions about fonts recently, and went to /r/typography looking for exactly this sort of material -- found it lacking :c

This is a treasure, I know there are a few "Little Big Things"-esque font-focused blogs, and my next hope will be traditional forums like high-logic.

You were looking for good, well-informed writing on a topic, and went to Reddit? That’s, uh, optimistic.

That is _exactly_ why people still search reddit.

This is a classic example: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=font+review+websites+r...

Sometimes you're leaving reddit as quickly as you visited, knowing you found the sorta thread you want, and ctrl-f'ing all of the https:// to dig further.

But maybe more often I'm just going to https://hn.algolia.com/ which almost always to take me somewhere else, less so to read a buncha chatter

> minuscule detail

Well done.

Bethany is still active on instagram. Seems like she has moved on.

I'm most familiar with Windsor from the Whole Earth Catalog and the Mesa Boogie (specifically "Boogie") guitar amplifier logotype. Was very popular in the late '60s - early '70s, it seems.

https://wholeearth.info/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa/Boogie_Mark_Series

The thinking man's Cooper Black. Always like to see it in the wild.

Small world...the Elizabeth McNair pix on the page[1] is the logo to one of my more favorite restaurants[2]. I bought a tee shirt of it for my kid...it's pretty cute. You don't think about the people who produce those things and how talented they are[3].

[1] http://elisabethmcnair.com [2] http://beetlecatatl.com [3] Of course, it's now fashionable to dismiss them since it's cheaper to just grind them up and feed them to AI.

I wish the site offered a RSS feed and/or Fediverse account. Great content.

https://fontreviewjournal.com/feed/ ?

Thanks! Couldn't find it in the sites metadata.

Designed in 1905, but very much reminds me of the 'Bellbottom' font that was popular in the 70s - for my generation, most familiar in The Goodies tv series - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goodies_(TV_series)

It is a lovely font but those angled o's and sloped n,m,h in the lower case are too distracting for me personally. I can imagine it being popular as slightly more professional looking Cooper Black (as discussed a few times in the article), especially if one sticks to upper case.

Not a single mention of Woody Allen?

> If you’re wondering why there’s a certain genre of notable in-use of Windsor that’s missing from this review, it isn’t due to oversight—it’s quite intentional.

Somehow I missed that. I get why you wouldn't want to do that, but IMHO they're inseparable. You couldn't possibly use it in movie titles or marketing without evoking him.

The uneven weighting makes this font very ugly in my opinion.

funny how much this font reads as 2015 rather than 1905

"European trappers and fur traders explored some areas of Utah in the early 19th century from Canada and the United States."

Huh? European trappers from Canada and the US explored Utah? What now?

Look up Etienne Provost, Peter Skene Ogden, and Jim Bridger. European (ancestry) trappers from Canada and (the then-existing) US explored (parts of what is now) Utah (at least as far as European knowledge of it goes).

Any free alternatives?

Fraunces is lovely, free and open source, and available on Google Fonts.

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