Greetings Typophiles, and Stefan Seifert in particular,
As you know, I've been playing with Centaur for some years now. I'm in love with the original metal version in all its optically scaled splendor. I consider the digital version available from Monotype to be inferior in quality, especially when compared with the intense beauty of the original. I've had discussions on and off with the folks at Monotype, but ultimately their business interests and my primarily scholarly interests in the font do not match well.
I have fairly little time these days to draw letters, so, at the rate I'm going, it would be years before my Centaur designs would be complete enough to make a real font release. Yet, I feel it would be a shame for people not to have some access to the work I've done.
Thus, I have decided to make a release of the incomplete work in progress. It consists of four optically scaled variants. In order of increasing robustness, those include Monotype Centaur 60pt, Monotype Centaur 14pt, Monotype Bible Centaur 18pt, and Foundry Centaur 14pt. Most variants contain most of a-z, some contain a fairly complete A-Z as well, the Bible version contains 0-9, and there is very minimal punctuation.
I am calling this release "Museum". I cannot legally call it Centaur, even though that is its true name, because of trademark law. As it turns out, "Museum" is the original name chosen by Bruce Rogers, so there is some historical justification.
Here is the release, including all FontForge and Spiro files.
I hope that Typophiles enjoy these fonts and even manage to get some use from them. Since they are released under OFL, the door is open for someone else to come along and collaborate by filling out the glyph range. Last but not least, people may enjoy opening the Spiro drawings and seeing the logic behind the outlines.
Other previous threads relevant to this one:
