WF Ovid, another Art Nouveau resurrection

Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.)
Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.) Posts: 213
in History of Typography
This is my take on Ovid by Heinz Keune, originally published in 1903. This is number eight of twelve fonts that'll make up my Art Nouveau design kit. 


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Comments

  • Nick Curtis
    Nick Curtis Posts: 118
    A lovely addition to the family. Personally, I think that Heinz missed the boat on the S shapes, but a faithful revivalist generally has to dance with the one that brung him or her.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    I believe that this is a typeface well worth reviving myself, and I compliment Oliver Weiss on a great job.
  • Vasil Stanev
    Vasil Stanev Posts: 775
    edited May 2020
    All fine and good, but maybe you should rephrase the part about the languages to something like "Middle-european", "European extended Latin" "all of... except Cyrillic" or something similar. Eastern Europe proper uses Cyrillic except for the Baltic states. Polish is considered belonging to the Western Slavic group, Serbo-Croation (whatever the name should be) uses both. Sorry for the nitpick.
  • Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.)
    Oliver Weiss (Walden Font Co.) Posts: 213
    edited May 2020
    Yeah, even the "Western" isn't right, as the font doesn't support Greek. I think I may just change it to "multi-language".  
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    edited May 2020
    Vasil Stanev said:
    Eastern Europe proper uses Cyrillic except for the Baltic states.

    Huh? Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania all use the Latin script. Only Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro use Cyrillic in Eastern Europe. (Perhaps, though, it is reasonable to view the Czech Republic and Slovakia as being, like Germany, in Central Europe.)
    Of course, technically, one could refer to the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia as being part of Eastern Europe too, as they are, or are partly, west of the Ural Mountains, but normally in English "Eastern Europe" means the former Warsaw Pact states (and Yugoslavia).

  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,440
    Nick Curtis said:
    Personally, I think that Heinz missed the boat on the S shapes.
    I keep reading the /O/o/ as /V/v/. 
    But I have a serious crush on that /a/.
    An interesting problem is how to use unconventional structures like that in ligatures/dipthongs like /ae/. I don't love the bottom stem in this /ae/ and remove that part of /a/ as a matter of course when designing /ae/, but in this case I wonder if it's helping to make the quirky /a/-half legible.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    Nick Curtis said:
    Personally, I think that Heinz missed the boat on the S shapes, but a faithful revivalist generally has to dance with the one that brung him or her.

    I blame that on the typeface being originally designed to serve a language community used to Fraktur, and so a stylistic alternate would not be a bad idea if the typeface is to be used more broadly.
  • Vasil Stanev
    Vasil Stanev Posts: 775
    edited May 2020
    John Savard said:
    normally in English "Eastern Europe" means the former Warsaw Pact states (and Yugoslavia).
    We do a bit otherwise, so I made a mistake, sorry and thanks for the correction. :)
  • ivan louette
    ivan louette Posts: 327
    Wonderful ! And a lovely poster !

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