Besley* is designed and maintained by Owen Earl, who is the creator of the font foundry indestructible type*.
The design process of Besley* started with looking at what works with Clarendon and maintaining those assets, while expanding design and functionality. In order to maintain a sturdy and heavy weighting, while adding text-size readability, wide capitals are used alongside appropriately widthed lowercase letters. To make Besley* render well on screens, a larger x-height was chosen. The medium weight of Besley* is bolder than typical fonts of the digital era, to give that cowboy era weight. Italics were built into the design process, so they feel like part of the family, instead of an after-thought.
v1.0
Original Release.
v1.1
Added the Fatface weight. Corrected kerning.
v2.0
Redrew letterforms to enable variable font versions. Improved language support. Added options for old-style and tabular numbers. Improved kerning and various other improvements.
v2.01
Added small caps designed by Fredrick Brennan
v3.0
Added a Narrow and Condesed version of the font. Added Cyrillic. Added dingbats.
4.0
Added support for the Greek Language
Build scripts can be found inside the "sources" folder. To build, download and install the required software listed in the "requirements.txt" file and run the build script that corresponds to your desired output (so if you want woff2 files run "build-woff2.sh")
Besley* 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 "build-ufo.sh" shell script, and UFO files will be generated using the FontForge files as sources. If a "ufo" folder is detected in the "sources" folder, the other build scripts will automatically switch to using the UFO files as sources instead of the FontForge files. All the scripts should work without having FontForge installed, so you should be able to contribute using your software of choice without downloading unwanted software.
If you have questions or want to help out, send me and email at [email protected]