The Gill Sans® Nova typeface, by Monotype Studio designer George Ryan, expands the much-loved Gill Sans family from 18 to 43 fonts and features a coordinated range of roman and condensed designs. Several new display fonts are available, including a suite of six inline weights, shadowed outline fonts that were never digitized and Gill Sans Nova Deco that was previously withdrawn from the Monotype library.
A variety of OpenType® features are supported that make it possible to include experimental characters from different points in Gill Sans’s long history, including pointed diagonals on ‘A’, ‘V’ and ‘W’ and alternatives for ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘p’ and ‘q.’ Proportional figures are also available as an alternative to the tabular designs.
The Gill Sans Nova family has a large character set that supports Latin, Greek and Cyrillic languages. The display weights support Latin only.
“Gill Sans was fast to strike a chord with people after its initial 1928 release and quickly became popular,” explains Ryan. “It’s been adapted for every publishing technology, from mechanical typesetting to digital imaging – always receiving the best treatment from Monotype in each iteration. This is especially true with all that we’ve added to the new series, while still retaining the familiarity of Gill Sans. My goal was to ensure clarity across digital environments, add missing weights, and bring more personality to the family with new display fonts, as well as Gill-inspired alternate characters.”
The Gill Sans Nova typeface family is part of the new Eric Gill Series, drawing on Monotype’s heritage to remaster and expand and revitalize Eric Gill’s body of work, with more weights, more characters and more languages to meet a wide range of design requirements. The Series also brings to life new elements inspired by some of Gill’s unreleased work, recently discovered in Monotype’s archive of original typeface drawings, designer correspondence and documents from the last century.