National Park Typeface

[charliepark]

In case your brain is thinking "wait; I thought it'd be that cool scripty typeface on the oddly-angled signage?", you might be thinking of the USDA's logotype for National Forests. Unfortunately, there isn't an available font for that exact face. Some cool specs, though, in the Forest Service's design guide: https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprd381002...

Section 1-18 (page 24) of the linked PDF has examples of the "National Forest", "National Monument", etc. logotype; Chapter 8 has some more signage specs.

[dhotson]

The closest font I’ve seen is Coniferous https://www.futurefonts.xyz/ohno/coniferous

[Loughla]

Those are the exact fonts I'm looking for, for an in-lay woodworking project I'm finishing. Any ideas at all what the fonts listed on 1-18 would be called?

[brians]

Those are excellent.

There are a few more cousins of these from the HP Lovecraft Historical Society at https://store.hplhs.org/products/hplhs-fonts

[Shivetya]

I simply found the PDF fascinating for the rules of usage for the various signage applied to roads. Both for how when individual signs may be used and when signs are required based on road layout.

[projektfu]

That’s exactly what I was expecting.

[chrissnell]

It's remarkable how difficult it is to find a cursive font like that. I think it looks a little like Dom Casual if Dom Casual were cursive.

[frankosaurus]

Initially, Mistral came to mind (also used in the movie Drive). However, there are significant differences.

[Freak_NL]

Tangentially related: there are quite a lot of good quality free software fonts out there. Some — like this typeface — are suited for display purposes, signage, and lettering. Others offer a full family of weights for typesetting body text.

I have my own shortlist of long-time favourites. To name but a few: Gentium Book Basic is a delight to read in print; Titillium adds a nice touch to technical drawings; Hack traces its monospaced code font lineage back to Bitstream Vera (through DejaVu Sans Mono), which back then kicked off a whole new period of free software desktop look-and-feel.

But I've never really found a site that collects these free software licensed fonts with curated reviews and use-cases. Sites like FontSquirrel offer a rough index, but contain no easy way to filter on more complex queries, and don't really show each typeface's strengths and weaknesses.

Does such a site or community exist?

[skyfaller]

How about https://beautifulwebtype.com/ ? "Guide to Only the Best Open-Source Typefaces"

There are also some more opinionated FOSS font forges like https://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/ and (slightly bizarre) https://www.velvetyne.fr/

[Silhouette]

But I've never really found a site that collects these free software licensed fonts with curated reviews and use-cases.

There's not much out there, I'm afraid. It looks like you're already aware of the sites that just list a million fonts and maybe let you try out rendering some sample text interactively. You might find sites like Typewolf[1] and Fonts In Use[2] interesting if you haven't come across them before. There's a little more curation and organisation there than on something like Google Fonts. But really, for free fonts, there's not a lot of detailed commentary in my experience. If you have specific questions or want advice about suitable fonts for a specific project, you could also ask on the Typography subreddit[3], which is fairly active and has a few people who know what they're doing around.

[1] https://www.typewolf.com/

[2] https://fontsinuse.com/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/typography/

[Tomte]

In German, but the selection is good:

https://praegnanz.de/weblog/freie-schriften-im-mini-portrait

https://praegnanz.de/weblog/schriften-im-mini-portrait-ii

And many in-depth discussions like https://praegnanz.de/weblog/gentium or https://praegnanz.de/weblog/cardo

[matt4077]

Google Fonts has at least Gentium and Titillium.

[microcolonel]

Google fonts tends to have a lot of the really popular open license fonts.

[elliekelly]

Not that I’m aware but if you were to build such a thing I’d most definitely be an enthusiastic user.

[asher]

Cool, thanks for making this.

This is basically the Roman Simplex font used in CAD packages, and included in the Hershey fonts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey_fonts

Hershey and CAD fonts are stroke-based, so line weight and endcap style influence the appearance.

Here's a JSONized version as part of the textlines tool: https://github.com/wildsparx/textlines/blob/master/fonts.jso...

Of course CAD fonts can be used at different aspect ratios - Roman Simplex is often used at 0.85 and that may be what National Park captures.

[GuiA]

The kerning on “NATIONAL PARK” feels quite loose, even given the context (normally wouldn’t comment this on HN, but given that this is expressly a typography related website...)

[Freak_NL]

Looks fine in the demonstration area for the various weights below. There has to be some space between the lines if you were to use a router to make a wooden sign with these (the stated design inspiration).

[hughes]

It's especially noticeable around the T - the visual area between A and T feels like about twice that between T and I.

[mc32]

Specially the A-T-I part feels like it could be better.

[ygra]

Kerning in general seems off in many examples. Either the webfont lacks kerning adjustments or that part is a bit unfinished.

[seanalltogether]

Also the first image with the quote, GLORIOUS is off between the L an O

[jt2190]

This feels relevant here:

"National Park Service Typefaces" https://www.nps.gov/subjects/hfc/nps-typefaces.htm

[bsimpson]

The National Park Service commissioned a font, and it's not public domain? That's total bullshit.

[DenisM]

ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS

[gjreda]

Having recently road tripped across the country for a move to SF, I found myself admiring the design of national park signage. It feels very timeless and iconic.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/13/76/e2/1376e2e5690719701689...

[astura]

That's national forest signage, not national park signage. National forests are managed by the U.S. Forest Service and national parks are managed by the National Park Service and they have different uses/purposes.

https://www.doi.gov/blog/americas-public-lands-explained

[hybrids]

I can't be the only one that really wants a monospace version of this. Although I suppose Inconsolata is good enough...

[Freak_NL]

The coordinates in that site's header take you to the Rocky Mountains National Park; a nature reserve in the United States:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/40.3428/-105.6836

[davidw]

Related, and interesting: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/13781/what...

[SamWhited]

AUR package for easy install on Arch: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-national-park/

[coleifer]

Awesome to see the university of Kansas being repped. I saw the blurb showing "KU" and thought...no way! Great job by some talented people. Thanks for sharing.

[nitrogen]

Suggestion on mobile site: either let me pinch to zoom (really frustrating when document-oriented sites disable this) or make the individual weights' previews bigger.

[grogenaut]

When editing the typeface samples it'd be great if the text pivoted to each style instead of getting set to "type here"

[btmiller]

Interesting that not all trail signs at our NPs use this font exactly. For example, I wonder if this is a separate font carved by a router: https://www.instagram.com/p/BmmACyogjEe/?igshid=12jeudc1pasu...

[justusthane]

Is that a wooden sign? Looks more like a painted metal sign to me.

[vladsanchez]

Thanks for sharing your typeface, but you should not claim ownership/creation for a typeface conceived in the LEROY Lettering system. My dad used LEROY as a draftsman in the 50s through 70s so I find their claim pretentious. Please research before stating your claims. Thanks.

[OliverJones]

Leroy lettering lives!

[Wistar]

Exactly. I had a Leroy lettering set given to me at some point. I know they were eye-wateringly expensive to buy but is a very cool thing. Super high quality manufacturing.

[dreamcompiler]

I still have my Leroy. This font immediately made me think of it.

[werds]

love this free font, also an honorable mention to Optician Sans: https://optician-sans.com/ which is a free font based on the classic eye test letter cards from opticians offices.

[jedberg]

This website is making my brain hurt. When I loaded it up, on my fairly wide monitor, it looked like this:

    N A T I O N A 
    
    L
    
    P A R K

You'd think a website by a typeface designer would not have this problem...

[0xffff2]

I can't reproduce this at any window size on Firefox, Chrome or Edge on Windows 10. I can hardly fault a typeface designer for not being an expert web developer who can build a consistent user experience on every conceivable browser configuration.

[matt4077]

It happens in Safari, but only within a certain range of window width of about 50px.

[OutsmartDan]

This is great. Not gonna lie though, took me like 3 minutes to find the Download button.

[vagab0nd]

OT: what does it take to design a font? I've always wanted to make my own. Is it a reasonable thing to do for an average person with an okay design taste, if I'm willing to put in the work?

[fimdomeio]

It can be done, but it's not easy. There's a lot of characters (uppercase lowercase numbers...) even if you're doing only ascii and making every character look balanced with all the others seems to me like a crazy amount of work. Then you also have spacing between character pairs. I never really attemped other than the simplest logo characters to be printed in a pen plotter, but if I ever would I would probably start at https://www.prototypo.io/

[Zobat]

You could use a parametric font tool, like https://spectral.prototypo.io/

There are others just the first I found.