NarrowWay & NarrowPath

In November, after seeing a number of highly condensed sans-serif fonts in use, I realized that my catalog was very weak in condensed fonts. I decided to create one and began with an elongated O. The rest of the letters were based on that width and height. This font became NarrowWay Ultracondensed. From there I altered it with thinner stems (Light Ultracondensed) and then widened it and created three weights for a condensed width. Widening this condensed width, I call the results a regular width, though it is still a very condensed font. None of these has a true lower case, but rather have alternative shaped letters, some based on lower-case forms, in place of a true lower case. I could find only a few fonts on myfonts.com that are more condensed than NarrowWay-Ultracondensed. 

After mostly finishing the 18 styles of NarrowWay, I decided to add a true lowercase to the widest of the three weights, and then also added the lower case letters to the other two widths. I spun these styles out as a new family, NarrowPath. Because they were very easy to create and because some people might find them useful, I added oblique styles for all the upright styles.

Previously the most condensed sans-serif font I had created was PeterPierre-Condensed, which I designed in 1992. It is shown below, above two examples of NarrowPath-Medium at the same point size. The first NarrowPath sample uses the font's spacing, which is quite loose. The second tightens character spacing to make it match more closely with the PeterPierre sample. The NarrowPath sample is smoother and more elegant than the PeterPierre sample.

NarrowWay and NarrowPath are available on Myfonts.com and FontSpring.com.