Foo

I released Foo on July 9, 1996 after someone on a Usenet group asked me to make something like the lettering on a Rolling Stone cover for the Foo Fighters. I didn’t know at the time that the source was Showcard Gothic, a fairly new design by Jim Parkinson. Instead, I looked at my Speedball lettering guide and built Foo from there; it was undoubtably the same reference material. The first release was an all-caps design with sharp corners. Compared to Showcard Gothic, Foo was less polished; the outlines were more simply drawn, which gave it a looser, less formal appearance.

On April 19, 2005, I issued a new version that added small caps and softened the corners slightly. Another revision followed on September 6, 2012, which improved spacing and kerning, added new punctuation and symbols, introduced class-based kerning, and refined some of the curves. The most recent update came on February 2, 2022, focusing on removing deprecated characters, expanding the OpenType fractions feature, correcting reversed quotation marks, and making minor refinements to the outlines.

Foo was widely used during its free period; I often saw it in signage. Once Showcard Gothic began shipping with Microsoft Office in 2016, there was little reason for designers to choose Foo over the better-drawn original. Foo was initially released with a free commercial use desktop license, and in April 2024 I placed it into the public domain.