Fen­gardo was the first step of a hike I took on among the moun­tains of type design. I had good shoes, a wal­king stick, I met some wise she­pherds who poin­ted me to the nice spots and use­ful springs. Now I feel ready to set­tle on the shady side of the hill, to get to know the place as my own. Fen­gardo Neue is a sign stuck in the ground there: “Here stops the hike. Beyond, I will walk tho­roughly every day.”

I lear­ned to draw let­ter­forms with Fen­gardo, then I wide­ned my gaze on other forms, to bet­ter unders­tand the for­mer, in com­pa­ri­son. And sud­denly some­thing chan­ged, I felt able to decide wether a dra­wing see­med fine or not. It might seem a mar­vel­lous hap­pe­ning, but fee­ling the abi­lity to judge doesn’t make the jud­ge­ment neces­sa­rily good. It’s from this point for­ward that expe­rience must be built, this one thing that refines judgement.

It were other shapes than Fengardo’s that made me reach first matu­rity. Fen­gardo is born of too vague a concept and of a will to assemble too many things toge­ther, which is some­times the case in student pro­jects. When I finally felt confi­dent enough about my jud­ge­ment and skills, I deci­ded to sort the heads of the Hydra a bit. I never inten­ded to make an exem­plary type­face, nor one meant to be sold for that mat­ter. Today I want to put an end to this story, clo­sing the chap­ter of stu­dies to enter the one that deals with the gathe­ring of expe­rience. I have other pro­jects, more serious ones, that this time are meant to reach the mar­ket even­tually, and it is on those that I wish to work fully now.

So here comes Fen­gardo Neue, refi­ned ver­sion of Fen­gardo. For now the type­face is com­po­sed of two weights, regu­lar and black. I noti­ced the ita­lics of the for­mer ver­sion see­med to be more suc­cess­ful that the other styles, which came as a sur­prise. This is why I shall also pro­vide new ita­lics; they’re on the way. I chose to add ‘Neue’ to keep the name while avoi­ding any confu­sion with the first ver­sion, and among the euro­pean pos­si­bi­li­ties to say ‘new’, the ger­man word is the one keen to my eye.

Fen­gardo Neue is dis­tri­bu­ted by VTF, a somew­hat insu­bor­di­nate and out of the ordi­nary foun­dry that pro­vides free fonts under the OFL SIL licence. The evol­ving web has exten­ded the reach of typo­gra­phy in the clouds of the Inter­net. The net­work also bears the open-source ideo­logy which is a cause I gladly befriend without fee­ling the will yet to acti­vely take part in it. So as a sym­pa­thi­zer, this is a tiny gift to this com­mu­nity, I hope it will be use­ful to some.

This is the end of a time in my course, which will be com­ple­tely past when I finish the remai­ning italics.

To conclude, a tiny comparison.

Fen­gardo Neue at Vel­ve­tyne Type Foun­dry
Fen­gardo Neue PDF Specimen

A gol­den print, pre­text for a dual type specimen.

Et vidéo: