Celestia Medium is a fan-made alteration of the font used in the Friendship is Magic logo, Generation B.[1]
Generation B
The actual font used in Friendship is Magic logo and promotional material is Generation B, created in 2009 by Harold Lohner. The font was inspired by the opening title of the movie The Parent Trap (1961) as well as other movies from the 50s and 60s. The font is available for purchase.
Celestia Medium
On February 20, 2011 a PNG image featuring all basic letters from Generation B was posted on Equestria Daily.[2] Artist and designer Purple Tinker (who also organizes BroNYCon) had traced the Generation B characters and created a font, which she called Celestia Medium. The font was not an exact copy of Generation B, in that some characters were slightly different shapes (based on Tinker's own artistic preferences), and the sizes of the letters were normalized to provide a more solid and normal feel than the funky, eccentric tone of the original font. She continued to refine the font and posted it on her deviantART account. The font became very popular, but was criticized for being essentially a copy of a commercial font and, caving to pressure, the author ultimately took it down.[3] Fans who downloaded the font at the time have continued to happily use it in their own work.
Equestria (font)
A font artist named Pixel Sagas created a font called Equestria, which is slightly similar to Generation B. This font has a different M, Q, V, X, Z, (originally from Celestia Medium, despite a part of the older description "Thanks to purpletinker for their effort on their version.") and also includes extended characters and punctuation, and Euro. It comes with regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic faces. The font is free for personal use.[4]
Celestia Medium Redux
After the removal of Purple Tinker's Celestia Medium font, this was at this point a deviantART user named Mattyhex stepped in. He tracked down a copy of Celestia Medium, and created a version of the Celestia font that wouldn't be legally controversial by taking the Celestia Medium files (as released by Purple Tinker) and editing the letter shapes to make them noticeably different from Generation B, while preserving the basic feel of the MLP FiM logo. Any criticisms of the Redux font have been based on how it deviates from Generation B, rather than how closely it copies the original. Like the original Celestia Medium, the letters don't deviate noticeably in size as they did in Generation B. Version 1.3 introduced Cyrillic and Greek glyphs, as well as many national characters absent from original font. Version 1.5 contained both upper and lower case Latin glyphs, and more characters. Version 1.55 featured a new lowercase "M", and this version comes in two versions: one with the normal uppercase 'I' (with the dot above it) and one with a more traditional uppercase 'I' (no dot). Celestia Medium Redux, like its predecessor, is available for free.[5]
References
- ↑ Purple Tinker's Fonts (2011-06-19). Retrieved on 2011 September 25.
- ↑ Equestria Daily: Pony Font. Retrieved on 2011 August 30.
- ↑ Celestia Medium pony font 1.5 by *purpletinker on deviantART. Retrieved on 2011 August 30.
- ↑ Equestria Font - dafont.com. Retrieved on 2016 March 31.
- ↑ Celestia Medium Redux v1.5 by ~mattyhex on deviantART. Retrieved on 2011 October 19.