Feed Me

Have you ever seen the capitals of Fette Fraktur? Eww. I thoroughly enjoyed customizing the S and B of the Slash Bash pumpkin party poster. Also, if you get the chance, we’d love to see you at the third annual Slash Bash. RSVP here.

The text deets.

I’m absolutely loving the error I got when printing out a presentation for a client. Look at the way the letters started to peel from the surface of the paper.  It comes from having a fully supported black (c100 m100 y100 k100) printed on a laser printer with a bad fuser.

Creativity pro tip: relish and learn from the surprising error. Sometimes the surprising “error” leads to a new perception and innovation.

Create-a-font-in-30-minutes exercise. It’s a display font, not meant for body text. I included a few alternate characters. Inspiration came from the cross hairs in my camera view finder.

Tracking value in InDesign – directly correlates to adding units to both the left and the right of the glyph in TypeTool.

Sometimes you’ll notice that fonts display on screen differently depending on what zoom level you’re looking at. This is based on the position of the anchor points of the curves. If all the points have been plotted on easily divisible even numbers, then it is more likely to display consistently with various zoom levels. Highly geometric fonts, by definition, will display on screen more consistently.

notice the exaggerated bounce in baseline and cap height alignment.

vs

This has the desired amount of bounce in cap height and no baseline bounce.

Unicorn Graphics The most amazing resource — Wood Type Museum

Setting up Illustrator to work with font creation:
Preferences – Units = pts

grid = 10 pts with 10 subdivisions
clipboard = aicb preserve paths, uncheck PDF
More details here

Quick links

mucca design uses this guy for type design devicq.com

After catching a redeye flight, and arriving at JFK at 6 a.m. one would think it would be tiring to hear a 2 hour lecture on the history of type in a warm and dark room. But it was inspiring to hear what Sara noticed from the various stages of letterforms. For example the differences in stresses between lining numbers, capitals and lowercase. I thought that the stresses would be similar, but they are carefully different. And, few typeset spans can equal the beauty of the original half uncials designed in 500 a.d. … And there’s even such a thing as a well executed, insightful, and beautiful powerpoint. The instructor proved it. Did you know that the first lower-case sans-serif  font was made as recently as 1835?

Here’s one of the handouts:

We mainly worked on our initial font creations. Mine is inspired by an old water meter near my house. See below.

Apologies for the picture quality. I purposely left my camera at home and am using a small point and shoot.

As Brian Memmott used to say, “If you’re ever tempted to use Avant Garde, use Futura”

Ok kids, time for another tweak. The e was corrected as well as the kerning, but for this post we’ll focus on the s. Notice that the s is about half the width of the d which makes the s feel too dense in compared to the pacing of the rest of the letters. To correct this, don’t use horizontal character stretching. Stretching the glyph to be wider produces too much weight in the horizontal widths/bowls of the s.

Occasionally, I get my hands on some anchor points that need a better foundation. Such was the case for a recent client project. The guilty font was none other than Quicksand. It’s a trendy free font right now. The main problem with the font is the lack of optical balancing in the letter forms. I’ve included an enlarged view of the previous form (pink) and the optically adjusted form (blue). Whenever you have an arm or bowl of a letter meet a vertical stem, it’s tasteful to have some tapering in the connecting area so the font doesn’t feel too clunky. Especially at small sizes, the font will tend to look muddy or heavy.

You can see the full update here.