The letterforms found on the wooden signage at the Rocky Mountain National Park inspired the creation of the National Park.
The letters on these wooden trail and directional signs are a system of paths, points, and curves that a router follows. The router’s "bit" follows the path and gives the letters its stroke weight or thickness when engraving a sign. National Park Typeface walks along the path of both honoring the quirky nature of the forms being created by a router bit and optimizing the forms to work in a variety of sizes and languages for print, web, and mobile platforms.
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The design of each character begins with a vector skeleton, represented by a series of coordinates that a router would typically interpret and carve into a wooden sign. From there adjustments were made to each skeleton to ensure comfortable legibility at different weights, and we also incorporate optical adjustments where the capabilities of an analog router falls short. The result is a typeface that stays true to its unique inspiration, maintaining its inviting warmth and distinctive character. It can be effectively utilized across a wide range of applications while preserving the essence that makes it truly special.
National Park is offered in 6 weights/masters (Extra Light, Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, Bold and Extra Bold and a variable version that bridges the gap between weights.
Character set….(need to add)
To contribute, see github.com/googlefonts/XXXXXXX
Digitizing this charming router-carved type of US National Parks and designing National Park is our way to document, archive, and celebrate this lettering while making it accessible for all to use. The first version of the National Park typeface was released in 2018. In 2023, the family was completely redrawn by Andrea Herstowski and Ben Hoepner and became part of the Google Font Library.
Andrea Herstowski teaches typography, design, and professional practice at the University of Kansas, Lawrence KC. Her Typographic Universe course introduces design students to the vast world of type design. Before joining KU she worked as a graphic designer in San Francisco, Basel, and Frankfurt. https://andreaherstowski.xyz
Ben Hoepner is a designer drawn toward type design, publication, and arts and cultural heritage work. As a Visual Communication Design undergraduate student at the University of Kansas. Ben was instrumental in developing National Park for the Google Library.
Jeremy Shellhorn is a designer, illustrator, and educator. He runs the DO (Design Outside) Studio and teaches Visual Communication Design at the University of Kansas. As a designer, he specializes in the outdoor industry, works as “designer-in-residence” at Tenkara USA, and has been collaborating with Rocky Mountain National Park since 2012. https://jeremyshellhorn.com
The source materialfor this revival includes photos and rubbings of National Park signage as well as a router file supplying skeleton paths of a limited glyphset.
Fonts are built automatically by GitHub Actions - take a look in the "Actions" tab for the latest build.
If you want to build fonts manually on your own computer:
make build will produce font files.make test will run FontBakery's quality assurance tests.make proof will generate HTML proof files.This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is available with a FAQ at https://scripts.sil.org/OFL
This font repository structure is inspired by Unified Font Repository v0.3, modified for the Google Fonts workflow.