Besley* is an original font created by indestructible type*. It is inspired by the designs of Robert Besley. This is version 2.0.

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

This is a fork of Besley* with added smallcaps and other fixes by Fredrick R. Brennan <copypasteⒶkittens⊙ph>.

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.
v3.0 (Fork) Added smallcaps

I use fontmake to build the finished font files. If for some reason you want to build this font yourself, follow these steps:

Download the complete source code, either by cloning this repository or downloading the .zip file.

Download and install fontmake which can be found here.

Build your preferred version of the font by running the corresponding build file found in the "scripts" folder. For example running build-variable.sh will build the variable version of the font. To toggle between the standard naming conventions and the indestructible type* naming conventions run the toggle.sh script found in the "misc" folder.