and time again upon an excellent typeface released last year that took
the design world by storm. I’m talking about Jos Buivenga’s font ‘Museo’.
I’ve never seen a font being adopted so quickly and fondly by web designers across the world. It’s been listed as one of the top 10 fonts of 2008 by MyFonts.com
Museo is being used everywhere, web and print. Museo Sans, its sans serif companion, was recently introduced and another style is in the works.In this article, I’m interviewing Jos Buivenga, the author of the popular Museo font and find out more about his influential typeface, his design process and what the future holds.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
I was born in 1965. I live in Arnhem (the Netherlands) and work 4 days a week at an advertising agency as an art director.
My love for type design started about 15 years ago. I was playing
around on my first MAC with a very early version of Quark Xpress. While
I was doing that I kept wondering what it would be like to set a piece
of text in my very own font.
Every typeface I worked on was a great journey where I could really
lose myself in the creative process and for me, that’s what counts the
most.
How was Museo conceived?
Museo was conceived out of the love for one letter form. In some
kind of daydream I saw before me the letter ‘U’ with the endings bent.
So it really started with my love for the letter ‘U’.
Can you tell us a bit about the design process?
The design of Museo was fairly straight forward. I remember a few things that really determined the design…
Museo looked a bit like some piece of bent metal wire so I thought
of making the stroke contrast as low as possible and I also wanted to
keep the shapes simple like for instance a nice round geometric “O”.
Because of that stroke’s weight and because of the fact that I
wanted a fairly heavy Museo weight it seemed very difficult to me to
make a heavy lowercase.
That’s the reason why Museo was first intended to be caps only. Thanks to my blog,
Museo got a lot of attention early on. People liked it a lot and many
started to ask for a lower case version. I still had some of the very
early contours of a lowercase with a 100 weight.
I had to research what concessions I had to make to the strokes of
the heaviest weight to do this. I tried some things and I eventually
decided that if stroke changes had to be made I would make them, if
possible, in the middle of the character.
I planned 5 weights for Museo. At first, I thought of just
calculating the weights in a linear way. I made a Multiple Master of
the extreme weights and this is how I first generated the three medium
weights in the beginning.
Having a thorough look at it, it looked like the difference between
the light weights (100 - 300) was larger than the difference between
the heavy weights (700-900). So, I then decided to determine the
weights by changing them manually, and to judge them by eye.
I measured the new stems and recalculated the values so that I could
use those for generating different instances. It turned out that the
weight distribution wasn’t linear, but more like a parabolic curve.
Museo was intended from the beginning to be a display font. That is
the reason why I chose to align the ascenders with the caps height and
also aligned the diacritics with the caps height. That way a more
harmonious look is possible when diacritics are used.
Why do you think people love this font so much, what makes it so special?
That’s a secret… No, I’m just kidding. I wish I knew, but I really don’t.
Will you be extending the font or adding more weights?
I have no plans to extend Museo, but I do have plans to make a Museo Sans Rounded.
Why did you choose to have each style named with numbers like 100, 300, instead of calling them bold, extra bold, etc?
When you set a font in FontLab to the appropriate weight, next to it
appears a number. Some kind of weight indication that (I’m not sure)
seems to me is being used by some programs.
Why do you distribute some of the styles for free?
When Museo was in the making I also had the plan to sell some of the weights. At that time I was already working 4 days a week and my goal was that I could financially compensate myself for that loss of income by selling fonts.I tried to do that for a while with donations but that didn’t work
well enough. Because everything I had done until then was for free, I
decided that I wanted to offer more free weights than paid ones.
When I was about to release Museo, my website
attracted many unique visitors each month and I didn’t want to put all
those people off that knew me only because of my free fonts. It was
kind of a gamble to do this and almost everyone I knew told me that I
was crazy. Especially because I offered the most usable and probably
also the most wanted weights (300 - 500 - 700) for free.
What are you working on now?
I’m working very hard on Calluna and Calluna Sans. Also, I’m working on Questa which is a square typeface like Didot and something I always wanted to do. And the one I mentioned earlier: Museo Sans Rounded.
A look at ‘Museo’ around the web
Jos Buivenga runs his own Font Foundry called Exljbris and he also runs a font blog. All fonts are available for purchase at MyFonts.com
There are 5 versions to Museo, 3 of which are free and can be downloaded from MyFonts.com as well. Museo Sans is available in 10 weights, 2 of which are free. Here’s more information on how to order or download these fonts: Museo | Museo Sans
Have you used Museo in your designs? Please share your examples with us and let us know where else you spotted ‘Museo’…
sources : webdesignerdepot.com
thumb up !
tobs markotobs ...
