No Bodoni Tinman

No Bodoni Typography, the Spurius Press and Thompson Design are trademarks and projects of George E. Thompson.

Tinman
Three weights, Roman & Italic

     There are a lot of new humanist sans serif typefacess, but they’re not based in the true humanist or Venetian forms of Jenson, et al., but in the oldstyle forms of Griffo and Garamond.
     I wanted to design a sans that specifically used the Venetian style forms. Using Jenson as a model was difficult due to the small x-height and the calligraphic foundation of the face. I finally decided to use the University of California face designed by F. W. Goudy. This is a Venetian humanist style face with more modern attributes and less calligraphic feel to it (despite the fact that Goudy calls it oldstyle).
     The resulting sans serif face is more aesthetically appealing and less quirky. It has a better flow from character to character due to it's basis in calligraphic form, though it never tries to look calligraphic.