Fraunces

The n in Fraunces leans. The lean is slight, enough to look as if somebody had nudged it, and that lean is borrowed from Windsor, 1 of the soft, slightly comic serifs that early 20th century display advertising was full of. Phaedra Charles, who designed Fraunces with Flavia Zimbardi at Undercase Type, said the family owes more to Windsor than to its other sources, Souvenir and the Cooper series, and the leaning n is the most direct link.

Google Fonts asked them for it in 2018. The brief was a display face that would show what variable fonts could do, and do it with a sense of humor. They answered with 4 axes. Weight and optical size are the usual pair. Softness controls how wet and inky the letters appear, and Wonky decides whether the quirky characters are swapped in: the leaning h, n and m in the roman, and in the italic the flagged ball terminals on b, d, h, k, l, v and w. The italic itself takes after Cooper Nouveau, with an Art Nouveau streak.

What you get here

The download on this page is the static cut of all that, 18 files, 9 weights from Thin to Black with an italic each, Latin with the extended accents and Vietnamese. Static files have no axes to move, so to play with Softness and Wonky you would need the variable version from the project.

The italics run narrower than the romans, handy for a pull quote. We like the heavy weights for magazine headlines at 48 px and up, where the soft, inky shapes are visible, and Regular for a short intro paragraph underneath. For a book’s body text we would look elsewhere, since there are no old style figures.