What the work is
Mark Simonson released Proxima Nova on 30 June 2005. It reworked Proxima Sans, his 1994 family, developing an idea he had been sketching since 1981.
How it was made
Simonson expanded the weights and widths, added small capitals and extended language support, and refined the characters. His release announcement describes both a long-held lowercase concept and capitals that changed from their earlier Futura-like proportions.
Simonson writes that he had worked on the family for almost 25 years, and that the lowercase concept in his early sketch has remained virtually the same since. Proxima Sans was his first attempt to realize it and one of the first major fonts he developed; he says Proxima Nova has ten more years of thinking and experience behind it. The plans it fulfils, in his words, are small caps and a wider range of weights and styles, including Condensed and Extra Condensed. He also lists extended language support and Unicode as things he never dreamed of when working on Proxima Sans.
What works
The family is useful to study as a system rather than a single attractive alphabet. Condensed styles, weight changes and small capitals give a designer different kinds of emphasis while retaining a relationship between the letterforms.
What does not
Family breadth does not remove the need to test actual text. A specimen heading cannot establish how a particular weight will perform in a dense paragraph, a narrow column or a multilingual layout.
What it influenced
The 2005 release fulfilled plans left unrealised in Proxima Sans. Its documented contribution in this account is the expansion of that earlier design into a more capable family, without relying on unverified rankings of web popularity.
The release came with a 93-page PDF sample book, which Simonson split in two. A nine-page overview has one-line display samples and a page of text samples. The 84-page full specimen gives two pages to each of the 42 fonts, one with display showings and one with text samples and the complete character set.
Is it worth your time
Worth studying for type-system development. Compare the 1981 sketch with the release specimen, then compare widths within the finished family; continuity and revision are both visible parts of the design process.
