Fonts put in the ser­vice of the pub­lic good, like road signs, and street names, try to be invis­i­ble most of the time. They’re here to do their job and noth­ing else. But cer­tain fonts accu­mu­late some­thing else, a sense of famil­iar­i­ty, a feel­ing of com­fort and affec­tion. That’s the think­ing behind this recre­ation of America’s Nation­al Park font, which a team of five design­ers has cre­at­ed after much lov­ing research.

Jere­my Shel­horn, the font studio’s founder, pin­points exact­ly that kind of com­fort:

Any­way I wasn’t fish­ing for some rea­son and was wan­der­ing around  fol­low­ing a deer trail turned into fisherman’s trail then back to anoth­er trail as some­time fish­er­man do.  I had trekked pret­ty far that day and wasn’t exact­ly lost, but I need­ed a lit­tle reas­sur­ance that I was head­ing the right direc­tion when I came across one of those ubiq­ui­tous signs you see in a nation­al park. You know the ones that have the text carved or “rout­ed” into it. Enter­ing Rocky Moun­tain Nation­al Park.

The font is “rout­ed” into wood­en signs and fol­lows famil­iar rules: round­ed ser­ifs, sim­ple angles. Shel­horn began to won­der:

…if it actu­al­ly was a type­face or “font” that any­one could down­load and use? Do park rangers have this as a type­face on their com­put­ers to set in their word docs, pdfs and pow­er point slides?…Turns out it isn’t a type­face at all but a sys­tem of paths, points and curves that a router fol­lows.

The Nation­al Park Type Face was cre­at­ed by Shel­horn, his part­ner Andrea Her­stows­ki, two stu­dents from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas– Chloe Hubler and Jen­ny O’Grady–and an actu­al NPS Ranger Miles Barg­er. It looks like the real thing and comes in three weights and one out­line font. Research was done by tak­ing pen­cil rub­bings of var­i­ous signs. And now you can down­load the fonts here.

Out­side this font, Jere­my Shell­horn and asso­ciates work on oth­er projects involv­ing our Nation­al Parks (always under threat from big indus­try and rapa­cious cap­i­tal­ists). You can check their var­i­ous work here.

Mel­bourne typog­ra­ph­er Stephen Ban­ham once described the cul­tur­al bag­gage that comes with Gil Sans:

When­ev­er I read text set in Gill Sans, I can’t help but hear the voice of an Eng­lish nar­ra­tor read­ing along with me.

With that in mind, what does the Nation­al Park font (down­load here) sound like to you? A friend­ly ranger? The sound of hik­ing boots on a trail? Bird­song? A bab­bling brook? The voice of nature itself? Let us know in the com­ments.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent

Font Based on Sig­mund Freud’s Hand­writ­ing Com­ing Cour­tesy of Suc­cess­ful Kick­starter Cam­paign

Braille Neue: A New Ver­sion of Braille That Can Be Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly Read by the Sight­ed and the Blind

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The design firm IDEO was found­ed in 1991, which may not sound like an espe­cial­ly long time ago, but con­sid­er it in tech­no­log­i­cal terms: what kind of devices were we using in 1991? How did they look and feel? Chances are not just that the phone and com­put­er you now car­ry around bear no resem­blance to the ones you would have car­ried around — not that most of them could be car­ried around — 28 years ago, but that your fur­ni­ture and house­hold appli­ances have changed as well. And think, too, of your every­day expe­ri­ences with shop­ping, med­ical care, and gov­ern­ment ser­vices: some have trans­formed, usu­al­ly for the bet­ter, and if oth­ers haven’t, it’s prob­a­bly not a good thing that they’ve stayed the same.

IDEO has worked on the design of prod­ucts and ser­vices in all those fields and oth­ers, and has indeed done much to rede­fine the field of design itself. The com­pa­ny’s founders and employ­ees tell the sto­ry in their own words in the short doc­u­men­tary video IDEO and a Sto­ry of Design above, which focus­es on IDEO’s achieve­ments in chang­ing the way we think about design (exem­pli­fied by the time they redesigned the hum­ble shop­ping cart on Night­line).

And though IDEO as a cor­po­rate enti­ty has only exist­ed since the ear­ly 1990s, it has deep­er roots in the his­to­ry of design, appear­ing as it did as a merg­er of four exist­ing firms, David Kel­ley Design, ID Two, Matrix Prod­uct Design in Cal­i­for­nia, and Mog­gridge Asso­ciates in Lon­don. Kel­ley, who’s also a pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford, appears in the video not only to remem­ber IDEO’s found­ing, but also to talk about its future.

So does Tim Brown, who after nine­teen years as IDEO’s CEO announced last week that he will step down, pass­ing the posi­tion on to for­mer glob­al man­ag­ing direc­tor Sandy Spe­ich­er. When IDEO enters a world, Spe­ich­er says in the video, “we bring our cre­ative lens, imag­in­ing how we can make that world bet­ter. I’m care­ful about words like ‘solu­tion’ or ‘the answer,’ because these are peo­ple-based sys­tems.” That remark, as well as the oth­ers made by the vari­ety of IDEO peo­ple — in a vari­ety of accents befit­ting a now-glob­al firm with nine loca­tions around the world — pro­vide a glimpse into IDEO’s mutu­al­ly insep­a­ra­ble cor­po­rate cul­ture and its con­cep­tion of design. And if all their talk about rein­ven­tion, respon­sive­ness, and ask­ing the big ques­tions sounds a bit high-flown, most of it may come down to an old say­ing that holds up in every domain just as well today as it did in 1991: There’s always room for improve­ment.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: A Crash Course in Design Think­ing from Stanford’s Design School

Down­load 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media

Saul Bass’ Advice for Design­ers: Make Some­thing Beau­ti­ful and Don’t Wor­ry About the Mon­ey

Pao­la Antonel­li on Design as the Inter­face Between Progress and Human­i­ty

Mil­ton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work: The Cel­e­brat­ed Design­er Dis­pens­es Wis­dom Gained Over His Long Life & Career

Dieter Rams Lists the 10 Time­less Prin­ci­ples of Good Design–Backed by Music by Bri­an Eno

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.