Richmond®
A display sans with a rich typographic history.
Designed by Jim Parkinson
Story
Before drawing Richmond, Jim Parkinson had made various custom geometric sans typefaces for newspapers over the years. As a matter of economy, the newspapers primarily commissioned narrower or condensed styles to increase the number of characters per line. In doing so, the frequency of hyphenated words in single-column headlines was reduced, and therefore more text could fit on the page.
Parkinson wanted to create a new, original geometric sans family with more normal widths in upright and italics, supplemented with several condensed weights and a set of ornamented capital letters.
The result of his efforts is Richmond, a geometric sans family in the spirit of Dwiggins’ Metro, Erbar by Jakob Erbar, and Edward Johnston’s Underground type. Currently available in 21 styles, this versatile family is suitable for many applications — including newspapers. Fun fact: while it was still in development, the Staten Island Advance used Richmond for headlines and display type throughout the news sections for some time.
Glyphs
Basic Latin 94
Latin-1 Supplement 93
Latin Extended-A 84
Latin Extended-B 2
Spacing Modifier Letters 8
Combining Diacritical Marks 13
Greek and Coptic 1
Latin Extended Additional 12
General Punctuation 16
Currency Symbols 1
Letterlike Symbols 2
Mathematical Operators 12
Geometric Shapes 1
Alphabetic Presentation Forms 2
Additional features include: Case-Sensitive Forms, Ordinals, Fractions, and Localized Forms.