Cooper* is a meticulously researched, historically accurate revival of the Cooper series designed by Oswald Cooper and released by Barnhart Brothers & Spindler in the 1920s.

Cooper* is designed and maintained by Owen Earl, who is the creator of the font foundry indestructible type*.

Cooper Black is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous fonts on the planet, but far less known is its regular weighted counterpart known simply as Cooper. First introduced to the world in the early 1920s, Cooper Black was always part of a family of fonts that included a non-black version, but over the past century, this family has been largely forgotten, leaving only Cooper Black.

This is a shame because the regular weight version of Cooper is beautiful. It has an organic, Art Nouveau, feel to it. Straight lines bow inward like the trunk of a tree, acenders curve backwards and forwards like the delicate stems of flowers. There is hardly a straight line or a sharp corner to be found. It accomplishes this while still be legible at text sizes, making it suitable for laying out a book or other passages of text.

Many of these delightful details are lost in the big bubbly boldness of the Black weight. I don't want them to be forgotten forever, and so Cooper* is thoroughly researched, meticulously digitized, revival of the original Cooper series.

v0.01 Pre-Release.

Build scripts can be found inside the "sources" folder. To build, download and install the required software listed in the "requirements.txt" file before running the gen-sources.sh script and the build script that corresponds to your desired output (so if you want woff2 files run "build-woff2.sh")

Cooper* is built and maintained using the open-source program FontForge, and by default will build the finished fonts using the FontForge files as sources. FontForge is free and cross platform, so it is possible for anyone looking to contribute to this project to use it to make modifications to the source files.

If you'd rather work with UFO files, simply run the "gen-sources.sh" shell script.

If you have questions or want to help out, send me and email at [email protected]