Benicia®
A creative blend of typographic influences.
Designed by Jim Parkinson
EUREKA!
The California Gold Rush began when gold was found at Sutter's Mill in February, 1848. Benicia became a way station on the way to the Sierra Mountains. In March 1850, Benicia became one of the first incorporated cities in California, a month after Sacramento. Benicia was the original county seat of Solano County. The lower floor of the Benicia Masonic Hall, built in 1850 with lumber donated by Benicia founder Robert Semple on land donated by Alexander Riddell, was used as the County court room and offices prior to the completion of Benicia's city hall. In 1858, the county seat was moved to Fairfield.
Story
In the mid-1970s, Roger Black and Jim Parkinson worked on making a font family for Rolling Stone® magazine. It was largely based on ATF Jenson, which has a mechanical, geometric edge to it. When Bodoni’s typefaces were reinterpreted for the industrial age, they lost much of their beauty and became stiff and mechanical, similar to what happened when Nicholas Jenson’s type became ATF Jenson.
About 20 years and many typeface designs later, Parkinson went back to the original Jenson types as the touchstone informing the design of Benicia with the intention of making the design less rigid than ATF Jenson. The result is a typeface descending from a rich typographic history* with modern design features that is brilliant in text settings.
Benicia has four styles: Medium, ExtraBold, and their italic cousins.
Use Benicia to give a contemporary feeling with hints of old style to passages of text in books, magazines, blogs, newsletters, brochures, and more.
*Speaking of history, Benicia is named after a small town on the eastern edge of San Francisco Bay, not very far from Richmond, California, where Parkinson was born. Fun fact: Benicia served as California’s first state capital, for a little while.
Features
Additional features include: Fractions, Superscript, and Ordinals.
Glyphs
Basic Latin 94
Latin-1 Supplement 95
Latin Extended-A 12
Latin Extended-B 1
Spacing Modifier Letters 8
Combining Diacritical Marks 14
Greek and Coptic 4
General Punctuation 16
Currency Symbols 1
Letterlike Symbols 2
Mathematical Operators 12
Geometric Shapes 2
Alphabetic Presentation Forms 5
Additional Glyphs 1
Benicia supports 202 languages. View our language support page to see which.