sans serif partner for New Caledonia
I’m revising an article for a journal whose main (well, only) typeface is New Caledonia (or a look alike; they managed to stop printing ligatures in 1999, so they may have changed printers and fonts or they dropped that drawer), and I’m looking for a companion sans serif for figures and maps. I know, I know, I should be using the body typeface for the figures as well. I go back on forth on that point with a rather regular frequency, and I’d like to at least see it in a sans that matches better than Gill, Futura, Cronos, or any of the others I’ve tried.
As an aside, I’m rather disappointed that, of fonts I have (which includes the Adobe Type Classics collection), very few of them have a prime symbol. (Also used for feet and minutes lat/long.) Helvetica has one, and some faces’ apostrophes work, but not always.
23.Feb.2007 11.04am
Maybe FF Bau -
anyway, if you don’t speak german, you get the feeling i guess
http://www.fontblog.de/C420185419/E430231085/index.html
23.Feb.2007 11.39am
New Caledonia is a modified Scotch Roman (styles like Bell, Miller and Georgia), which still has basically a Victorian structure, sort of between Neoclassical (Transitional styles like Baskerville) and Realist (styles like Clarendon and Century).
Sans Serif companions to look at would include:
Grotesques (Bureau Grotesque, STF Dyna Grotesk, Monotype Grotesque, URW Grotesk, etc.),
Neogrotesques (AG Old Face, Akzindenz Grotesk, Folio, Helveitca, Berthold Imago, Neuzeit S, Univers, Venus, etc.)
and Gothics (Bell Centennial, Bell Gothic, Franklin Gothic, News Gothic, Trade Gothic, etc.)
I agree that FF Bau would a good choice.
If you are looking for some natural display and titling companions for Scotch Romans like New Caledonia, check out Falstaff, Gothic 13, Inflex, Madrone and Thorne Shaded. Utopia Headline also works handsomely as a titling font for New Caledonia, as does Monotype Old Style Outline.
As for the prime symbol, most of the faces you mentioned should have it. Make sure your typesetting software isn’t automatically converting it to an apostrophe. For most fonts, you can access the prime symbol directly from the glyphs palette in InDesign.
David Thometz
23.Feb.2007 12.13pm
Stick with the Dwig; Metro.
23.Feb.2007 1.24pm
Apropos Metro, maybe Akira’s Metro Office?
http://www.linotype.com/135960/metrooffice-family.html
23.Feb.2007 2.35pm
Thanks for the suggestions (although it may take a while to work through 3/4 of the sans families :-D). FF Bau is definitely worth considering. Metro looks an awful lot like Gill, or are my eyes playing tricks? Or am I looking at the wrong Metro?
As for my methods for looking for the prime symbol, I was using the Special Characters/Glyphs dialog in Illustrator and Font Explorer (U+2032, PRIME). The glyph renders for less than 10 out of a few hundred fonts, including several opentype Adobe pros. I’m think I’m priming a primal fear of that glyph and I will now only touch it primly with a 10′ pole, except maybe while listening to either Primus or 4′33″.
23.Feb.2007 2.37pm
You could also try Font Bureau’s Relay, as well as Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Verlag. I feel they both wink at Dwiggins’ Metro.
24.Feb.2007 12.16am
All of these are also great suggestions (I can’t believe I forgot to mention Metro... Argh....) :)
David Thometz
24.Feb.2007 4.40am
Wow, Verlag is niiiiice.