This talk is an account of my project over the last few months to design an open source revival of the 1908 News Gothic font, including an outsider/newcomer’s perspective on the free font design toolchain, but with feedback on related tools as well, particularly scanning and vectorizing samples of the original typeface, and extending the original, Latin-only designs into additional orthographies. Reviving public domain works is not limited to fonts, of course, so there are potential lessons for other areas of design as well.