Ranger Naturalist Font
Ranger Naturalist Font
Ranger Naturalist is an all-caps typeface inspired by the hand-lettered WPA federal arts project promoting national parks in the late 1930’s. This font adds a modern twist to the nuance and perfect imperfections seen in those iconic prints.
The smooth curves of Ranger Naturalist are designed to be stretched, squished, and tweaked to achieve bold and adventurous layouts. With wide capitals, narrow lower case, alternate characters, and an irresponsible amount of discretionary ligatures—Ranger Naturalist can be remixed with ease.
This all-caps font includes upper and lower-case, punctuation, ligatures, numerals, a couple alternates, and a selection of underlines and symbols. It’s highly customizable and perfect for high impact and organic designs like posters, games, book covers, and more.
File Types: OTF, TTF, and WOFF
Discretionary Ligatures
Ranger Naturalist contains a reckless number of ligatures to give text a fluid, hand-lettered feel. Enable Discretionary Ligatures (in the Character panel or OpenType panel) for entire blocks of text, or be selective and only use it on certain words. Ligatures (connected letters) will automatically join together when the option is selected. The feature works similarly in both Photoshop and Illustrator.
Selecting Glyphs in Illustrator and Photoshop
The full set of glyphs are easily accessible through the Window > Type > Glyphs panel in Illustrator (Window > Glyphs panel in Photoshop). Double clicking a glyph while actively typing in a text area will drop the characters into the body of text.
This feature is similarly available outside of Illustrator and Photoshop as Character Map on PC, and Font Book on Mac—both programs will allow characters to be selected, copied, and pasted into word editing software.
In addition to selecting characters from the glyphs panel, a few characters have alternates such as the i, I, j, J, and &—those can be chosen by hovering over the selected letter while typing and choosing the alternate glyph (or right clicking in Photoshop and selecting Show Alternates for Selection).
Experiment with Mixed Case
Vary the density and tempo of your copy by selectively choosing capital and lowercase letters within the same sentence. By mixing things up it’s easy to achieve a hand-lettered style that looks organic and natural. Be sure to add the occasional ligature combo on common pairs such as: en EN eN and En — all of which result in slightly different looks. Check the font glyphs to see everything.
Distortion Friendly
Stretch, squish, and squeeze — this font is meant to be adjusted using brute force to fit any space. All the corners and curves are fine tuned to help keep the hand lettered feel even when stretched to nearly 200%.
Desktop and Web font Licensing
Once purchased, the licensed font can appear in unlimited commercial and personal projects including, but not limited to, physical end products, social media, packaging, and paid ads. The licensed font can appear in multiple websites owned or controlled by the Licensee. That means you can use it for: web app and website usage, embedding the font in projects, games, and design or print-on-demand applications. Go ham, have fun! Just don’t resell the font.
For prints of over 70 National Park WPA posters visit Ranger Doug’s excellent store.
