eurofurence is a family of geometric rounded sans serif fonts originally designed for EuroFurence, the first European furry convention 1995 in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Koog. I wanted to add to the atmosphere of the event by using a special "furry" typeface for the signs and name badges.
Back then, the only existing typeface created by a furry was
Malvern for TeX/METAFONT by P. Damian Cugley of Oxford.
(See the Malvern page.)
But as I couldn't get TeX to produce the desired results and time was
short, I decided to draw my own bitmap characters in a graphics program
and do a huge copy and paste operation. :) The picture compares the
original bitmap version to today's TrueType version.
Only later did I discover that Alan Meeks's Frankfurter
has many similarities to eurofurence (but only seems to come in
"medium", which is similar in weight to eurofurence bold, and a very
bold caps-only style). I didn't think of or look at Frankfurter when
designing eurofurence, honestly! :)
Back then, the eurofurence typeface was born, together with the con. Later, I had the possibilities to create scalable fonts and developed the first version of eurofurence for PostScript and TrueType in 1998. In February 2000, I became the victim of an unfortunate accident; as I recovered during the following weeks, I couldn't do much else, so I went back to working on my fonts to get a result that satisfies me. So here is the result, I hope you all enjoy it!
The italic fonts aren't just slanted versions of the upright fonts,
but several characters have been redesigned (such as a, b, d, e, f,
p, q) to give the italic version more individual character.
f-ligatures, as far as specified in Unicode, are included as well as the EuroFurence logo (written in the Albedo typeface, a pawprint and the tbk logo.
The earlier oldstyle and ranging numerals were replaced by a
new set of medium-height numerals that should go equally well
with uppercase and lowercase letters while being distinguishable
enough from both.
Due to the peculiarities of TrueType hinting (every letter would need a program to control where the pixels go), these fonts are not as well-hinted as some others on the market, so they don't look as nice at low resolutions on screen. Thanks to the sufficient resolution of contemporary printers, this is not a problem when printing.
I would like to thank P. Damian Cugley
for creating Malvern, which was the major inspiration for
eurofurence, and Tes-Tui-H'ar for organizing EuroFurence,
which was the reason why this typeface was created at all.
A number of letterforms were inspired by Prof. Rudolf Koch's
Kabel typeface of the 1920s. Special thanks go to Ray Larabie, who
helped me to combine the fonts nicely into a family.