I have just finished a slab serif for a graphic design project.
I wanted a free Clarendon style font but all the good ones are paid for and it seems like all the free ones were not so good.
So I set out to produce a free Clarendon style font. I called it Munson. It was inspired by a font by Stephenson Blake & Co in the early 1800's called Consort but with some of the ideas from the Clarendon font from the Fann Street foundry in London.
The italics are meant to have the look of the italics used for algebra in old mathematics text books.This is a free font

This is a free font under the SIL Open Font License, free for both commercial and non commercial use.
The original has been posted on
Deviant Art.
Any constructive criticism will be appreciated.
Comments
It's free so you have nothing to loose by trying it and seeing if it creates the effect you're after.
The italic spacing is correct in my opinion. The bearings for a long piece of text at a smaller point size tend to need a looser spacing and it is a common mistake to set things too tight because one has looked at the characters very large on a monitor. I will have another look at it though.
The other issues, I see your point and I will probably make some alterations to the font.
One must be cautious of mission creep, this happened with my first font Kelvinch , I was unsure which characters to include and didn't want to miss anything vital so it ended up as an unwieldy monster with everything in there, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian and almost all the latin blocks fully populated.
This was the wrong way to develop a font.
Maybe I might add Cyrillic to Munson if it proves to be popular.
The serifs are clearly bracketed here, and Clarendons are characterised by a much lower thick/thin contrast. This design looks more like a Scotch to me.
A quick first glance tells me you implemented the OpenType language feature wrong. The only additional language table is for Dutch, and when applying that, all of the other features get disabled (because it only contains a ligature substitution for your /IJ). I realize you state a couple of times "Hopefully THIS will be the final version" and so I won't pressure you into fixing it, but you may want to be aware of this if you use the same approach in your newer fonts.
Munson, a Cowboy style baseball player.
Audrey Munson, the model for some of the most famous statues in New York.
To make use of the project files you will need to have 'Font Creator' installed on your system.
This problem was caused by my poor understanding of the open type system at the time I made Kelvinch, I have learned a lot since then.
I have resisted the temptation to make any more modifications to Kelvinch in order to get the fix out quickly.
Hope this helps.
Not a criticism, just an observation.
André
I just wanted something which would evoke the spirit of Victorian printing and this is what I came up with. Of course it looks like some of the Victorian typefaces, that was the intention.
Also I adjusted the widths of the curved bowls and adjusted some of the numbers which was suggested by Craig Eliason in his earier posts.
I have now included the source files for both 'Kelvinch' and 'Munson' in their respective downloads. You are welcome to download them. But to use the files you will need to have 'Font Creator' installed.
Please respect the OFL license, any derivative works must have a different name, any derivative works must also be under an open license and you cannot sell these fonts.
I have included a PDF sample of the new version.
Consider removing the foot serif from the old-style four.
I still think there are problems in balancing the optical weight of curved vs straight thicks. In the regular roman caps, curves seem thicker (e.g. squint at /R, the right side reads heavier than the left). All of the ball-and-stick letters /b/d/p/q/ are worth reviewing for this too.
The balance of the curved stems against the straight stems now looks correct to me except for the R which maybe I adjusted too much, this will be fixed in the next iteration.
The foot of the 4 will remain. This is the way it is in the original 'Consort' font and although this font is not a slavish reproduction of that font I think the 4 looks OK as it is.
Thanks for your advice.
Whilst I was working on it I decided to add Erwin Dennison's brilliant Open Type Fractions code, thanks Erwin.
Then I thought about whatSamuil had said and had to agree it did look like the standard soviet block serif font so I have added some Cyrillic characters.
So far I have not added any of the historic or archaic characters or any ethnic group with less than ten thousand readers. But I am unsure just how much I need to add (I will probably end up adding too many as usual).
Can anyone see any mistakes or things which would look odd to a native cyrillic user ?
This is not live on the website yet, that is still the old version for the time being, there is still a lot of work to do before I release the update.
Yes this is my variation on the 'ghe', I don't know if this is appropriate or not. Certainly it's something I haven't seen in other fonts but is there any reason why this character should not have ball terminals ?
If it is inappropriate then I will remove them and terminate the strokes with flat ends. It's a pity, it took me a long time to get this character 'right'.
What do other people think ?
I would rather iron out the bugs now than release something wrong.