Mark Simonson is perhaps one of the most respected and well-known type designers in modern times. With more than 100 type designs to his name, he’s built an incredibly successful career for himself. In fact, unless you live under a rock or inside a cave, you’ve certainly seen his work and probably didn’t even realize it. After all, he designed what is possibly the most popular font in recent years, Proxima Nova, a type design that’s been used on more than 30,000 websites and in countless advertisements, magazines, and title sequences.
In spite of his success, Mark considers himself to be somewhat of a “late bloomer” when it comes to type design. It wasn’t something he dreamed of doing as a child, although his childhood did feature a considerable amount of drawing and art exploration. In those early days, he actually figured he’d become a cartoonist as an adult, or that he’d at least land somewhere in the visual arts.
The son of an engineer, Mark grew up around tools and gadgetry. He learned much about the mechanics behind things while spending time in his father’s basement workshop and that experience helped to shape Mark’s future career as a typographer. When it comes to designing type, artistry plays as vital a role as the technical execution does, so it seems a natural progression that Mark would pair his artistic background with his mechanical background and bring them together in the field of typography one day.
While he started out as a graphic designer in 1976, he didn’t open his own lettering and type design studio until almost 25 years later. Since then, he’s worked as a full-time type designer and hasn’t looked back since.
Mark’s work blends inspiration from both the past and present. He very much loves classic designs and has certainly revived “historical” type designs in the past, but he also focuses on crafting new and modern designs with decidedly contemporary aesthetics. Still, there will always be a special place in his heart for vintage design elements, which are evident in one of his more recent releases through YouWorkForThem, Acme Gothic.
Based on the popular gothic lettering style of the early to mid 1900s, Acme Gothic features a Deco-esque architecture that’s reinvented to be modern, stylish, and fresh.
Available in Condensed, Compressed, Normal, Wide, and Extrawide, each style in Acme Gothic offers weights that include Light, Regular, SemiBold, Bold, and Black for a total of 25 distinct design options. It’s well suited to signage, displays, posters, advertising, product packaging, logos, headlines, website designs, merchandise, flyers, tickets, apparel designs, branding, and identity projects.
Loaded with OpenType features, Acme Gothic includes capitals to small caps, contextual alternates, numerators, denominators, fractions, subscript, superscript, scientific inferiors, and stylistic alternates for greater design flexibility. Its multilingual support extends to Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Vietnamese, Pan African Latin, Pinyin, Igbo Onwu, and Basic Greek for incredibly far-reaching accessibility in international design projects.
Mark Simonson currently offers 17 products through YouWorkForThem, including a variety of sans serifs, serifs, scripts, and display fonts for projects of all types. Visit his portfolio to check out the rest of his work and stop back often to catch up on any new releases!
