MS: I think the trend has to do with computer screens which, until fairly recently, have had fairly low resolution. Even Google, after sticking with its iconic serif logo for more than 15 years, introduced us to a brand new sans-serif look in September that is cleaner, more modern and geometric. It’s clean, minimalistic and works well at different screen resolutions. Choosing a sans-serif font when designing for screens and mobile has become a normal and standard practice in the design world. The rise of computer, mobile and tablet devices means there’s a higher demand for designs for screen, which means sans-serif fonts move to the front of the line. As Simonson said, it’s a simple, friendly font, but that’s not the only reason we all decided to jump on the Proxima Nova bandwagon. In 2015, over 25,000 websites have chosen the geometric typeface to represent themselves. Maybe it has to do with the open, circular forms, which perhaps give it a “friendly” appearance, especially in the lowercase. It doesn’t have a lot of fussy details or mannerisms. I tried to make the shapes of the letters simple and clear. MS: I don’t really know, but I like to think it has to do with the qualities I put into the font - the proportions, the spacing, the overall look and feel. TV: Why is Proxima Nova a font people can easily connect with? Gotham quickly became popular, appearing on the cornerstone for the Freedom Tower in 2004 and in President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign materials. Two years earlier, Tobias Frere-Jones released a geometric, New York City-inspired typeface, called Gotham, on commission from GQ magazine. In 2002, Rolling Stone used it in a major rebranding. Proxima Sans was put in the back burner.īut in the early 2000s, the geometric simplicity of Proxima Sans regained momentum. Sales were low, and Simonson was occupied with his new job and the birth of his child. Sometimes font names are chosen specifically to showcase certain letters, and that was the case with Proxima Sans.”ĭespite Simonson’s years of hard work, Proxima Sans was not successful. “Plus it didn’t showcase some of the font’s stronger features, such as the ‘s’ and the ‘a’. “Visigothic was a silly name,” Simonson explained in an interview with entrepreneur Cameron Moll. In 1994, Visigothic was publicly released through FontHaus under the name Proxima Sans. The result was a hybrid a face combining modern, even-width proportions with a somewhat geometric appearance. I wanted the general proportions and stroke contrast of Helvetica or Akzidenz Grotesk, but with construction and details borrowed variously from Futura, Kabel, the ATF gothics (Copperplate Gothic, News Gothic, Franklin Gothic, etc.) and the U.S. Some existing faces influenced the look of Visigothic. While he liked the font, he wanted to go for a plainer, more geometric approach, so he built upon Zanzibar to create a new font called Visigothic. In 1991, Simonson was working as an art director for the magazine Business Ethics, in which he used Gill Sans.