‡…to down­load.

‡Today is just ano­ther day, except today, I am tur­ning into George Strait and I Give It Away !

‡I had a dif­fi­cult pre­gnancy. It will have requi­red my sun­day per­fec­tio­nism to come to an end and the wise voices of some friendly peers, for me to decide this font is fini­shed and ready for a (first) release.

‡By ‘release’ I mean giving away for free and there are seve­ral rea­sons for that. The first of all is that I’ve always felt like a typo­gra­phic Mitch Buchan­non, a pro­ba­bly nice bloke but crip­pled by ambi­tions too grand for his capa­ci­ties. Then, I’m from this shitty all-free gene­ra­tion which never unders­tood that music, movies and even typo­gra­phy have to be paid, as they are the result of much fuss and hard work. Indu­ced by my condi­tion, I have lit­tle faith in most of the usual eco­no­mi­cal models going on in the type world. The one that convin­ced me the most this far was tried by Jos Bui­venga, who releases the basic weights of his fonts for free and gives the rest for a few bucks away. I find it’s use­ful for the trial pur­pose it ful­fills, the user can prac­ti­cally start to explore the type family which might ease the buying of the whole, even­tually. This being said, I’ve no idea how good this method has tur­ned out to be and I thought hea­ring he didn’t try to make a living out of it, at first. This last point is inter­es­ting to me as I’m not trying either. Any­way, I’m not saying I can pro­vide type design work of pro­fes­sio­nal qua­lity, espe­cially regar­ding the high stan­dards that can be expec­ted in mat­ters of ker­ning and hin­ting, for instance.

‡I had first ima­gi­ned I could release a light­weight ver­sion with a basic cha­rac­ter set contai­ning only the strict mini­mum for most usages. And then I rea­li­zed how absurd this idea was as I had drawn all the rest, plus, I would have had to clean the Open­type func­tions, which I’m far too lazy to even start thin­king of.

‡So here comes the heal­thy lit­tle baby, weigh­ting 400+ glyphs, basic set, old style figures as default, lining figures (tabu­lar and pro­por­tio­nal), small caps, some his­to­ri­cal variants, tit­ling variants, etc. Just for the fun part of a list, the font can be used for the fol­lo­wing lan­guages:
alba­nian, basque, cata­lan, danish, dutch, english, esto­nian, færoese, fin­nish, french, gali­cian, ger­man, greek, indo­ne­sian, irish, ice­lan­dic, ita­lian, male­sian, manx, nor­ve­gian bokmål, nor­ve­gian nynorsk, por­tu­gese, somali, spa­nish, swa­hili, swe­dish.
The lan­guage before last is my favo­rite, as it allows the Lion King to woo his future wife with Fen­gardo, in his native language.

‡Lin­guis­tic and mediocre joke set aside, I have to thank the silent actors of this pro­duc­tion, star­ting with my tea­chers who where kind enough to ino­cu­late the typo­ma­nia into me, my friends who suf­fer me, the ones who edu­cate me, those who kindle my typo­gra­phic verve and the beta-testers who liked the type­face even in the time of it utter ugliness.

‡Ok now, let’s not pay the bill:

[ Down­load Fen­gardo ]

Fen­gardo by Loïc San­der is pro­vi­ded under the terms of the licence Crea­tive Com­mons BY-ND 3.0. If you need any autho­ri­za­tions beyond this licence, we can dis­cuss it, fol­low the sign: loic (a) aka­lol­lip (dot) com

<black tea­ser>

> Radio extract (Dzr)