In all these cases, they are going from a sans serif font to a slab serif font. Again, all three were designed by the same designer Adrian Frutiger, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen either used with Univers, even though they are both well done and share the same underlying structure. But when was the last time you saw them used together? I can’t think of any examples.Ī similar case is Univers and Serifa and later Glypha, two different attempts to add serifs to Univers. Then there is Avant Garde and Lubalin Graph. And I’ve never seen Helserif in use outside of specimen books. I don’t think this works very well for various reasons. This sort of thing has been done before, as with Helvetica and the (unauthorized) Helserif (created by Phil Martin). Since it already existed for years (especially if you count my earlier Proxima Sans) and was not conceived that way, I had to take a different approach. If I had conceived of Proxima Nova as the sans serif component of a superfamily from the start, it would probably have turned out very differently.

In my discussion here, I’m going to leave out cases like Lucas DeGroot’s The Sans and The Serif, which where conceived together as a superfamily. I would work on it off an on, but wasn’t able to come up with a satisfying solution until fairly recently. This idea has been on my drawing board for a long time. A serif typeface meant to be paired with it. One way around this dilemma would be to create a serif version of Proxima Nova or some sort of serif companion face. They’re thinking of a normal serif typeface. Rockwell is a slab serif, which is great if you want a slab serif, but maybe not the best choice for text, and a slab serif is probably not what most people are thinking when they ask. However, Candida is pretty obscure and funky, and only has few styles. They actually share some structural similarities with Proxima Nova, so there is a certain logic to it. Two others I sometimes suggested were Candida and Rockwell. Or maybe Georgia or Utopia, or really, any of the many modern moderns. I’ve used Century Schoolbook with it a few times. Probably something rather plain and straightforward. Something modern (as opposed to old style) with a fairly large x-height. I like to be surprised.īut, that didn’t seem to be the answer they wanted to hear, so I tried to think what I might use myself. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t like to tell people how a typeface I designed should be used. And as a type designer, I didn’t really think it was my problem.

You might come up with something completely different than I would.

That’s one of the skills you learn when working with type. It was more like, figure it out yourself. It’s not that I never combined serif and sans serif faces in my work as a graphic designer.

In all the time I’d spent working on Proxima Nova (and its earlier incarnation, Proxima Sans), I had never really thought much about this. Here you can watch the video or read the illustrated transcription below. For our first Font Fashion Week, type designer extraordinaire, Mark Simonson, spoke about his new typeface Proxima Sera, the long-awaited companion to the world-famous Proxima Nova.

Proxima nova meaning