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I just released some new fonts.

Stendo – is a wide slab serif that never lock you down to western style — for sale here:

Atrek for sale here:

This April Apple’s company valuation passed the $600 billion mark. There are only 5 other company’s to reach that same value. Here’s a few commonalities of their logos.

Simplicity reigns supreme.

• All of them employ a strong super-simplistic-easy-to-remember logo
• 4 of the 6 use a single color for their primary logo

• 3 use red; 3 use blue.
• 3 of the 6 use a clean typographic ligature.
• All of the 6 have simplistic customized fonts. Even Apple a customized version of the ubiquitous Myriad.
• All of them have gone through revisions that greatly simplified the logo. This helps logos to be easier to reproduce and apply to products.
• 4 use a sans-serif font. One uses a script.
• 3 use a shape and then repeat it at least 4 times
  • Microsoft with one block repeated in various colors
  • GE with the tear shape rotated and repeated
  • Cisco with varying and repeating vertical lines
• All of them make legibility and readability absolutely obvious
• None of them use dimensionality – shadows, layers or foreshortening.

For a recent logo development project, a beloved client loved a particular sketch. After culling through thousands of fonts in the database memory it became clear that a custom typeface would be the only way to proceed. So the lettering sketches began.

Frequently when crafting the perfect logo it makes sense to start with a pre-existing font and then alter a few of the letterforms to make sure all the letterforms flow together nicely. Conversely, the following font is completely built from scratch starting with a single line being drawn in Illustrator and incrementally building and manipulating the curves.

For those who’ve embarked on custom font development, you know it can be a joyous discovery of voluptuous curves and intersections. However, as Christian Robertson said, “the ‘s’ is the most difficult letter to design in the [english/latin] alphabet.” I agree — there were a few profanities released during the building of this set. Here’s a few tips to sculpting an ‘s’ of steel.

› Make sure that the upper and lower counterspaces aren’t equal.
The bottom is frequently slightly larger than the top
› The diagonal curve will likely be thicker than the rest of your strokes
› Don’t be afraid to start over several times
› The terminals determine a significant amount of the attitude of the font

FYI – This font will not be for sale as it is a proprietary font built for a client (unless they choose to make it available) If you’re looking for similar well-crafted fonts, you should consider: Silas Dilworth’s Breuer or Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Forza.

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