Years ago, when my website was called gning.net, and later gning.org, I sketched out a stylized font. Now I’ve made an actual font from that design called Gning New, and generated .otf and .woff2 font files from it.
the font's purpose
It’s not designed for flowing readability — it’s designed for distinctive style. You might say it’s intended for (cough) branding. So it can be used for headings and titles, but maybe its best use is for, like, logos or banners. For any other purpose there’d be a lot to criticize about it.
its origins
The basic idea of doing many letterforms as a single smooth stroke is based on my handwriting, where for instance I write a “d” by looping counterclockwise from the top and finishing by continuing upward, or a “P” by starting with an upward stroke and then curling back. But I have not taken my handwriting to the point where I make an “n” a simple arch or an “a” a simple spiral.
history: 2004-2024
It was in late 2003 that I first claimed the domain gning.net (which I have
since lost). I wanted to make a banner for it, and I ended up creating
a GIF image in which the word “gning” was symmetrical, but only some of the
time, as the first “g” was sneakily animated to flip backwards and forwards
so it was alternately legible and mirrored. Having designed those
letters “g”, “n”, and “i”, I then followed that style to spell out the
URL. This GIF was the first thing showing on the home page (which had a
pale background at the time):
Over the next year or two I extended from there to make section headings for a redesign of my home page. Those letters were all cut-and-pasted images, not actual fonts that you could use to write arbitrary text. It wasn’t until 2024, after retiring from my career, that I found an online tool which enabled me to produce an actual font, by first drawing the letter shapes as SVG paths.
how complete is it?
You may notice that I have not yet shown any uppercase letters in it. As yet, no uppercase letters are designed. I think I did once produce a set of uppercase letterforms, but I can’t find it now, and from what I remember I would have wanted to do it over anyway, as I don’t think I did very well with them on the first attempt. I may get into that later. At this time the font contains only the 26 lowercase letters, the numerals, and eight punctuation marks. Also, I was not able to set a line height that avoids consecutive lines touching top to bottom; I had to override that with CSS.
let's see them:
Okay, here is the full set that I’ve got so far:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789 :',.-/?!
alternate versions?
I have a “Gning Gap” version where some of the letters consist of disconnected pieces — namely “f”, “h”, “k”, “m”, “t”, “w”, and “x” — but I have put that aside for the time being. Here is what the letters in this variant look like:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
There are several letters where I made different variants before settling on one. I think the “m” had the most different versions. But the main variation I want to pursue is a bolder version with heavier strokes, as this would be closer in feel to the nineties original, and be better suited for banner-like uses.
can we use it?
No. Copyright is fully reserved, and for now, licensing is denied.