The only Champion of which I’m aware is that from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

Thread moving to the TYPE IDENTIFICATION area

I understand Jean (and Yves I see the edit you made). I am sorry if that was an offensive thing to do. The font I showed is not making money for anyone else, and I did not point to where I found it, and as far as I could find there was no available version of Francois Boltana’s font. Do you know of one?

In the past, when we found a digitized version of a font that was not offered commercially we have shared information about it, so I thought I was not promoting a pirated version.

I can see this is a ‘gray’ area, and I accept your opinion that in this case, the design is too recent to be ‘revived’.

No problem Mike. This was a very gray area case, so I conferred
with JFP about it and decided to remove the rip-off. Now if only
somebody decided to release the font, everybody’d be happy.

Does anyone know who owns the rights to this typeface?

Well, another way to look at this is that trying to stamp out the
existing fonts leaves nobody happy. To say that doing so does
honor to Francois Boltana is open to argument. I dare say that
most of us, were we Boltana now and able to look from our
resting place, would MUCH rather see two lovingly made fonts
that make available the exquisite Champion to be seen and
used than to have our typeface tied up in some copyright limbo
or, worse, the copyright holder seeing it as not worth digitizing
and having no intent to release a font. Saying otherwise takes
a certain measure of arrogance, in my opinion.

If anyone knows who owns the rights to Champion, please
speak up so that I might write and urge the creation and
release of a nice, better made, truly legitimate font that would,
indeed, make everyone happy.

After death of Fran

Aha, thank you for that perspective, Jean.

An interesting situation where a commercial foundry
might be open to litigation, but a freeware font creator
is but a shadow to a spurned widow. Well, the creator
of the unnamed fonts duo was far from an amateur;
it’s almost as if a pro was familiar with this situation …

In any case, my hope that the nefarious freebie survive
is only strenghtened (for the sake of the beautiful script
and the designer). I will, however, quit being a thorn in
Yves’ side about his decision here.

Who’s a thorn in my side? As I said, this is a very gray area case,
so I take full responsibility for removing samples, names and links
of the suspected rip-off. When in doubt, I’d rather play it safe.

That being said, I’d like to go on record that I respect and appreciate
your view on the freeware/shareware community. We may agree
more often than you imagine. I also feel your opinions ensure that
the debate stays open and interesting. It’s just that I have to police
this place, so I need to be strict.

I don’t envy you the job, Yves.

I, too, would have to say that we may agree more often than
you imagine. We simply draw the line in the sand at a very
different spot. I’ve been trying to be quiet and helpful only;
as much as my inner voice allows, anyway. Cheers.

To shift this topic back to Fran

Paul is looking for a typeface by Francois Boltanos called Champion. Any suggestions?

thanks for redirecting my question to this forum„,I have checked the Hoeffler site before and they have a “champion” however it is not the Francois Boltano type„„as a layman I am amazed at the lack of info on this designer„„this type being in my minds eye „,incredibly attractive!!!

do you have a sample which you could post? jpg or gif? this would help. (don’t know why i didn’t think of this in the first place.)

I have a sample of Boltana’s ‘Champion’ in the Script Font ID Guide. The reason there is so little about him is that he died young, apparently. I don’t think the typeface was ever digitized commercially. [edited by moderator]

Sample from the Script Guide:

[edited by moderator]

Ah. We’ve had this here before, I remember now. Thanks, Mike.

Here is a link that shows the works of French type designers. It was the source of the original graphic above.

This was originally linked from one of Luc Devrouye’s pages about French Type, but the links were changed.

Boltana also did Stilla in 1973. (It’s incorrectly attributed to Robert Hunter Middleton on that page, unfortunately.)

Well, that crude to propose any pirated version of an design made only as exclusive by the designer who died few years ago, defintely too young. I don’t like to see used the term “reviving” when its mostly piracy. Forgive me Mike but its nothing against your good intention to help.

Champion received in 1989 the Morisawa Gold prize…

Today, I’m pretty sure that <href>Adobe Bickham Script</a> is a good remplacement, specially the recent OpenType version.