Gill Sans Font is Remixed For Modern Times

November 10, 2015 at 2:01 pm By

For many designers the fonts used in a site design is pretty critical. After all, the browsers spend much of their time reading the information so an eye-catching font is pretty necessary. Gill Sans is among one of the oldest and most popular fonts to date and it has been remixed into Gill Sans Nova for today’s modern world.

“Last week, acclaimed type foundry Monotype unveiled a modern interpretation, a typeface it calls Gill Sans Nova,” according to Wired.

“It is joined by Joanna Nova, a modern revival of Joanna, which Gill also created; and Joanna Sans, a wholly original typeface that mixes Joanna and Gill Sans. Monotype calls the three typefaces the Eric Gill Series.”

The new revamped font contains the undertones of the original with a little twist. Monotype’s team led by Steve Matteson and a team of international designers were also able to create a whopping 75 fonts. The font is still as crisp and clean as the classic font, which is also used by Pixar and BBC.

“In 1989, Fiona MacCarthy’s biography of Gill revealed some reprehensible aspects of his private life, including acts of incest and bestiality that he documented in his diary, earning him posthumous scorn,” according to Wired.

“But for much of the 20th Century, he was a hero to artists and designers, renowned for his skills in type design, calligraphy, sculpture, and drawing.”

Today his work is being brought to the forefront of design once more as it is used as inspiration for the revamping of his classic and widely used font. Gill Sans is mostly popular in England, furthermore their commercial industry, as Wired reported. It will be interesting to see how web designers take to the new font and even more interesting to see if England’s commercial adopts it as they did the original.

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