Typeface Names “N” through “P”

NATHAN begins with a basically Deco ultra-black titling style having extreme thick/thin contrast (similar in appearance to Marquee) but departs from it in two important respects. The first is the little “cross-hairs” at the terminals, which serve as quasi-serifs. The second is the many quirky but consistent touches making it plain that this is a Thirties face rethought in Nineties terms.

NEEDLEPOINT is an interesting alternative to conventional types for any context in which needlecrafts—or, indeed, a wide spectrum of home crafts—are involved. Actually the letterforms are closest to those used specifically in traditional cross-stitch, but they have been stylized to the point that even the most punctilious should have no quibble with their use in connection with a broad range of activities.

NESBITT can be looked at as a sort of stencil font or as a modern squared sans that is stylized in an unusual way. That is, its stencil qualities need not inhibit its use in contexts where that would not apply. For example, in a gardening contexts, it's more likely to suggest the texture of a dry stone wall than a stencil. But, like any font, it will not do its job well unless, however unconsciously, the reader makes some sort of connection between type and text.

NEVILLE SCRIPT might be called a handwriting font (comparable to those in the WSI-Fonts Handwriting Collection), but it really is quite stylized and, therefore, more similar to the older sort of “handwriting” fonts, like our Helmsley. Admittedly, however, it is more irregular than Helmsley and friends and consequently has a more specific personality.

NEW MEXICO is similar in appearance to a metal face called Paris Flash, issued originally by the F. T. Française foundry. The rather nervous surface texture is held in check by the simplicity of the sans-serif outlines that it fills, giving the characters a strength that many “jittery” fonts lack. At the same time, it retains enough electricity to galvanize browsers into readers, which is the purpose of most heads.

NEWELL BLACK is WSI’s realization of Neuland, a face designed by Rudolf Koch for the Kingspor foundry and first issued in 1923. Its rough-hewn look has appealed to several digitial-type designers as a relief from both the button-down patness of typical ultrabold sans faces and the blowzy bulbousness of Cooper Black and the like. This realization adds small caps to what originally was a caps-only typeface. (This collection's Jurassic, an inline face, is otherwise similar in appearance to Newell.)

NEXXUS, similar in appearance to a typeface called Zephyr, makes its points by keeping the reader off-balance—that is, by being decipherable but not readily readable, so that the reader must focus attention on the text to make any sense of it. This ploy, which to some extent is shared by all novelty fonts, flies in the face of the truism that legibility is the ultimate criterion in typefaces, and it's true that the ploy will galvanize attention only for a limited time.

NICKLE traces its lineage to a face called Neil Bold that may have been designed for photo setting. It is ultra-fat, with crisp, clever detailing. Use it where you want to make an impression and remain amusing but not slapstick. It is neither high-style nor high-camp, but there's plenty of room left for it between those extremes.

NIGHTSIGN CAPS The obvious reference to neon signs in both the name and the design matches the basically Deco approach to the individual letterforms to produce a font for eye-catching banner headlines that hint at stainless-steel highway diners and Busby Berkeley musicals. Because of the intricacies of the curves, Neon Caps should only be used at large point sizes; below 36 points the detail becomes muddy on dot-matrix or desktop laser printers. Nightsign Thick can be used smaller because of its simpler, sturdier approach; even at large sizes it may carry better than Nightsign, depending on the application and context.

Non-Roman alphabets and ideographs These are faithful digitizations of the character sets used for a variety of languages. If you plan to actually set texts in them, however, you will need both a knowledge of the language in question and appropriate software and character mappings for using them. The collection includes:
ARABIC, CYRILLIC (Russian), GREEK SANS, GREEK-WSI, HEBREW-WSI, JAPANESE,
KASMIR, KOREAN SANS, PERSIAN, PUNJABI, RUSSIAN BLOCK, and SANSKRIT

NOTEHAND is a handwriting font much in the spirit of Present Script but elegantly thin and aristocratic, with some of the stylization of a Flora or a Nadienne—particularly in the bold. NoteHand would be a fine choice as an alternative to conventional scripts in formal invitations—a field much in need of its freshness—while NoteHand Bold is perhaps better suited to stylish advertising copy, where it or the normal weight can be used for body copy as well as heads.

NOUGAT is a strong, distinctive sans titling face with slightly projecting terminals that hint at the use of a broad-nibbed signage pen. While the letterforms themselves are very similar to those of many sans faces, these details lend character and invite reading in a way that the impersonality of the more familiar versions does not. It can be used successfully for titling in everything from advertising to books. Nougat is somewhat similar in appearance to a heavy version of a face called Dynamo.

NOUVEAU ASTA might be called an ultra-Deco font. It is as quintessentially a part of the inter-war years as a Marcel Breuer chair or an Airflow Chrysler. The witty balance between thick and thin, round and straight cannot be appreciated at small point sizes, so give it room to show off its fine—if somewhat severe—detailing.

OBESION could be classified as an ultra-condensed version of a classic Bodoni face. It is similar in appearance to Onyx, which was popular in the 1930s and 40s for advertising heads—and even body copy on occasion—but then went into eclipse until recently. Now it is among the ultra-condensed faces that have become extremely popular for headings and running heads in magazine layout and brochures.

OETJEN SHADOW DISPLAY adds shadowing to a fairly conventional serif display face, making it among the most neutral, and therefore most easily used, of our shadow faces. Its letterspacing also is not as loose as that of some shadow faces. It works somewhat better in all-caps than in upper- and lowercase, perhaps, but it will attract attention either way.

OLD ENGLISH GOTHIC The word “gothic” is used equally for this sort of "black-letter" font and for certain sans-serif fonts, making it ambiguous. Equally familiar—and equally misleading—is the term “old English,” since the source of the letterforms is the black-letter of Guttenberg and his contemporaries in Fifteenth-Century Germany. Be that as it may, character sets of this sort have become almost mandatory for display use in academic contexts as well as naming newspapers.

OLD NEWS has an unpretentious charm that can be quite telling in the right context. Among hand-lettered, distressed-typewriter and calligraphic fonts, it falls approximately in the middle, with some of the properties of each. As a text face, it is open and legible; set large, as a display face, it is full of interesting but unobtrusive irregularities. But it is best applied one way or the other, not used for both display and text in the same page.

OLDSTYLE is modeled on Prospera, one of many recent designs that rethink classical typefaces in contemporary terms and, for that reason, are preferred by many typographers to the strict revivals of the original models. The Oldstyle family is particularly interesting because of the special ligatures that are available in the Flourishes font. If you want truly elegant typography, select Oldstyle for your text. It is available in condensed form as well.

OLIGARCH, as any typeophile will recognize immediately, is similar in appearance to Antique Olive—named after its original type-foundry, not the martini condiment. The “Antique” presumably refers to the sans-serif design, often called “grotesk” and thought of as a crude, rudimentary sort of alphabet in the face's native Germany. Paradoxically, the subtle modernity of this specific design is what has made it such an enormous success, particularly for ads and catalogs.

OMNECO”s Victorian or Edwardian touches—which are most obvious on the “A,” “N,” “f” and “g”—give it a special personality that is emphasized by the use of triangular details. The latter originated in Victorian times but continued to appear in “up to the minute” fonts for almost a century. The resulting historical ambiguity keeps Omnico from being either particularly appropriate or particularly inappropriate for many history-related contexts.

OPTICAL CHAR OCR-A This standardized face originally was designed specifically for OCR (optical character recognition) use. The growing availability of OCR software that can read normal faces has left OCR-A (and the similar OCR-B) as something of an anachronism. Today it probably is used more for its evocation of automation and robotics than for its original purpose.

ORACLE Another of the faces mandated by previous use in daisy-wheel devices, Oracle is characterized by its substitution of small caps for the lowercase of, for example, Letter Gothic. Because this design dispenses with descenders, the uppercase can occupy the full height of the type, making the result larger and often easier to read than standard sans-serif designs of the same point-size. Being typewriter-derived from a face called Orator, it is a monospaced face, which accounts for the relatively loose spacing of the small caps.

ORIENT is a traditional chinese font in aping the quick brush strokes of Chinese ideographs, though it really resembles Chinese writing only very superficially. Such fonts have become standard for such applications as Chinese-restaurant menus, however, so here is our version, which is patterned after a typeface called Hong Kong.

OSBORNE is similar in appearance to Oz Handcraft, a font only recently made available in digital form. Its style hints at turn-of-the-century graphics (the era of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, in fact), though it is right at home in current typographic trends as well. Far too condensed to support extended text, it is strictly a display font. Use it where you need a sharp contrast to either assertive bold fonts or sinuous scripts.

OSTANE The model for this "humanist" face is among the triumphs of Twentieth Century type design: Hermann Zapf's Optima. In a sense, it splits the difference between serif and sans-serif faces by flaring the stroke terminals to provide the emphasis of serifs while keeping the shapes clean like sans-serif. This, plus the superb balance of the letterforms, creates outstanding legibility; Optane has been widely used for full-length book texts that few typographers would even think of setting in a conventional sans-serif.

OUT HOUSE DISPLAY CAPS follows fairly literally the details of a face known as Shantytown. The image it creates is of something nailed together in quick-and-dirty style. So be conscious of the sleazy overtones that such a face carries with it and take care that they don't rub off inappropriately on the context to which you apply them.

PAGECLIPS obviously plays with paperclip shapes in the letterforms and is similar in appearance to a face called Paperclip. It is intended as an amusing novelty face for headings in press releases or notes of any sort where the idea of clipping your page to some other, possibly less ephemeral publication is appropriate.

PAINTER A fanciful display font, Painter suggests an Oriental character in many of its “brushtrokes.” Though this sort of face must be used sparingly, it is another for which some contexts cry out. When one does, a more conventional face would certainly not be an adequare substitute.

PALISADE Yet another extremely popular design of Herman Zapf, Palatino (created in 1948), is the point of departure of this face. Though originally intended as a display face, it is widely and very successfully used as a text face for everything including full-length books. Its spunk and wit sustain interest, while its excellent balance and openness make it extremely legible—qualities that are hard to overrate in almost any application.

PARADE carries quirkiness to the brink of the bizarre—and perhaps even a little beyond. What saves it from appearing to be a mere distortion of conventional letterforms is it inventiveness of detail. The little ball terminals, for example, are reminiscent of some typographic details from a century ago and suggest the round bells at the ends of the fringe on a jester's costume. Tension is constantly maintained between the characters (like the H) that have an italic lean, and those (like F) with a “backhand” lean.

PARCHMENT, similar in appearance to Fontek Papyrus, will remind many typographers of Present Script. Parchment is both a bit more formal and more individual, however, with taller ascenders in the lowercase, high-wasted E’s and F’s, alternate forms for many letters, and oldstyle figures. It also adds a raggedness to the letterforms, as if printed on a very rough paper. It thus can convey a strong feeling of elegant hand calligraphy while retaining the dignity and excellent legibility of its basically roman letterforms.

PARKER PLACE Like its model, Park Avenue, Parker Place is a close cousin to Coronet among script faces. It has more flair and individuality than the latter, and somewhat more wit, but it maintains a similar relationship to its handwritten roots, which it suggests without pretending to be anything but what it is: a graceful script typeface.

PC CharSet will be welcomed by anyone who has to print straight ASCII texts from Microsoft Windows, which assumes the ANSI character mappings in place of the original IBM extended ASCII set. The face is monospaced, like a typewriter face, and includes all the IBM line-drawing characters, so shareware documentation and similar texts will print as their writers intended.

PEN TIP, though technically a script, does not ape the variable stroke weights of handwriting. It is frankly a typeface—and a rather flowery one, suitable for all but the most formal of printed invitations, for some sorts of advertising, and for occasional relief of what might otherwise be an overly austere typographic scheme.

PENCHANT is a somewhat modernized black-letter face that, in many details, hints more at the use of a steel lettering pen than the sharpened quill of the scriptoria aped by Guttenberg and his colleagues. It would thus be a particularly appropriate choice for preprinting the text of a presentation scroll or diploma that will be hand-lettered by a modern calligrapher with the recipient’s name or other specializing details.

PENSTYLE, though somewhat stylized, represents a conservative writing hand. That is, it has some details in the uppercase that suggest Spencerian training, but it is neither as formal nor as careful as that writing style of almost a century ago demanded. At the same time, it is not the sort of writing one expects from anyone under fifty today. If you need a handwriting style for Granny Soandso's recipes, this may be spot-on.

PENYAE Among sans-serif type faces that break the rigidly mechanistic mold of their ilk by introducing very individual traits, Penyae and its inspiration, Peignot, are among the most elegantly extreme. Very French-modern in feel, its deft mixture of upper- and lowercase letterforms gives this design a special chic that suggests the most sophisticated boutiques of the Grands Boulevards.

PERDOO is another of those fonts whose personality on the page will depend on context. For general use, on the one hand, it is a pleasantly contemporary hand-lettered style: fairly forceful but not overbearing. In a more exotic context, however, the eye may catch on some details that suggest Art Nouveau—the letterform of the “w” for instance—and emphasize the font's latent quirkiness. Evaluate it in that light before you commit to it.

PHINSTER is a sans face, available in several weights, that is quite classic overall but is full of intriguing details that set it apart as a WSI original. Among them are the unexpected, fine-line elements in the G, K, and R, the slanted crossbar on the lowercase e, and the feathered terminal in the descender of the lowercase g. Even subtler is the slight battering of the outer stems of the M, more often found in serif fonts than in sans.

PIPEFITTER Holy plumbing, Batman, but this is an unusual font! Use it for fun, or use it where water supply or drainage is involved. But unless you're editing a newsletter for plumbers, you can become enamored of Pipefitter only at risk of appearing ridiculous in most contexts.

PIXEL POINT Anyone who has owned a dot-matrix printer will immediately recognize the intent of this display font. While not literally derived from the pin-firing charts of typical dot-matrix fonts, these character patterns simulate them with, if anything, greater visual logic because of their pixel-grid layout.

PLANKS DISPLAY CAPS comes from a font called Trading Post. The strokes of which the characters are composed resemble slashes with a broad, house-painter's brush or planks with broken ends, depending on how you look at them—or, more precisely, what context you chose to employ the face for.

PLASTIC SHEET is an all-caps font modeled on Fanfold, which was also used as the pattern for “MasterCard”, in which it was expected that characters sloping upward to the left (the “uppercase”) would be alternated with those sloping in the opposite direction (“lowercase”) to create a pleated-ribbon look. If you prefer, you can stay with one case to create the impression of a series of single-character cards, one behind—or in front of—the other.

PLAYCE A highly creative adaptation of the Art Deco concept, Playce has a very up-to-date feel that recommends it for display use wherever modishness is an issue. Few faces of its sort carry equal impact or style. In both respects, it is far ahead of the typical Art Deco models of the 1930s, which look a little stogy in direct comparison.

PLAYING CARDS essentially has one use and only one: to explain card games. If you need to do that, you will be hard put to find any alternative computer font. To that extent, the clarity and attractiveness of the present design are beside the point. If you don't have it, you probably won't have anything for its intended purpose.

PLEDGE is one of a series of faces whose origin has been obscured by many conflicting names, presumably because its early uniqueness and popularity led to wide imitation. Though there is some difference in detail, Aurora, Permanent Headline, Inserat Grotesk, and Helvetica Compressed (though the “r” in particular clearly is not Helvetica) all are similar. Their extremely compact but stylish letterforms are characterized by very short ascenders and descenders and strong emphasis on the blocky verticals.

PLOVER is a graceful, linear sans-serif whose multiple weights give the typographer fine control over the effect, particularly where multiple sizes are called for as well. The diagonals used in the squarish bowls add interest, but the basic simplicity of the letterforms and the large x-height make it both legible and compact. It thus can be used effectively for longer texts than many display fonts will support.

POCONO All geometric sans fonts constructed with a uniform line width have something of an Art Deco look about them and, generally speaking, must be very straightforward if they are to stake any claim to timelessness. Pocono—like WSI’s Logan—rises above this truism to achieve a particularly contemporary look, relative to other fonts of its type.

POOKY DISPLAY is at once stentorian and playful. It has a lot of the Art Nouveau in its exotic stylization, but there is enough about it that is not specifically of that period that it's not particularly limited by the association. You can use it almost anywhere where you want to be showy and offbeat.

PRESTON is similar in appearance to the typeface, Present Script. Despite the name, it represents hand lettering, rather than handwriting. It offers excellent clarity and legibility, yet it maintains a strong personality through the fine, brush-like modulation of the stroke weights, giving it an airy quality that is both attractive and useful, even for fairly long texts.

PRITCHETT SCRIPT, similar in appearance to Hogan Script, neatly splits the difference between careful, easily legible brush lettering and breezily informal brush script. The characteristic, looping tails on the “o,” “w” and some other letters establish its rhythm and its implication of quick hand work. Choose it for this quality in heads, and it will strengthen whatever sense of interpersonal communication that they convey.

PROMENADE has a look that may be recognized by those familiar with Letraset’s Plaza. Though another Deco face, it is quite different from any other in the WSI-Fonts collection. Both alphabets are uppercase, but that in the slots regularly used for capitals are intended for use as initial letters only; the circular flourishes to the left of each one would otherwise interfere with both the preceding letter and with legibility. So type your text in upper and lower, and let Promenade add the flourishes only where they belong.

PROTEGE similar in appearance to two little-remembered typefaces, Phenix and Tourist Extra Condensed, Protege is a delicately “moderne” design that hints at Atlantic crossings on the Normandie. Though it is full of playful details, its tall elegance maintains a basically sober stance. Type of this sort has recently been rediscovered as a display face for well-bred advertising.

PURLOIN comes from a design of Eric Gill, among the leaders of Britain's typographic flowering between the two World Wars. Joanna, as he called it, has light square serifs and fairly tall ascenders. The italic is considerably more condensed, and noticeably more individual in its letterforms, than the roman. Since its later appearance in digital form, the most common versions of which are known as Perpetua and Forever, the face has become very popular for a wide variety of texts, from books to ad copy.

PYXIDIUM and PYXID Pyxidium includes two full uppercase “hand-lettered” alphabets. If you want maximum regularity within its extemporaneous style, stick to either the caps or the lowercase keys. But for the ultimate hand-lettered look, deliberately mix the two, paying particular attention to letters that are repeated within the same word. By alternating between the two alphabets, you can suggest a quick note with a felt-tipped pen. Mixing the roman with the “Quick” (oblique) in the same passage, however, tends to look unnatural and give the show away; try to stick with one or the other. Pyxid is a modified version that scales down the characters in the lowercase positions, to better simulate the writing style of some individuals.