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Overview
Mark Simonson’s Bookmania shows off its allround utility in this site for an Australian creative agency’s conference, bringing character as well as enough variation of style and weight within the family to create a sophisticated typographic layout.
Analysis
Bookmania is Mark Simonson’s revivial of Bookman Oldstyle (1901), incorporating elements from versions of the typeface published in the 1960s and released as a fully featured contemporary digital font.
Compared to Simonson’s more widely known yet plainer Proxima Nova, Bookmania is a typeface with much more personality. This is in part down to the wealth of OpenType features which include hundreds of swash characters, stylistic alternates and ligatures, and is where the sixties influence mostly finds its expression.
While the designers of the Fieldtrip website have been able to bring in some of that personality into the masthead design (in the process going to work on the character outlines to make them look somewhat more hand cut), all those OpenType-powered features weren’t really available to them for the rest of the site’s typography.
But Bookmania’s strength is that it retains enough of that personality with only the core character set that it can give a site design just the right amount of flavor while remaining very functionally readable.
Of Bookmania’s five weights, the designers here have used Light (for extended body copy), Regular and Semibold (for headings and navigation), plus Semibold Italic for the homepage’s call outs.