Typophile - Antarctica - Comments

The spacing on your

Hofweber — Wed, 5 Mar 2008 11:08:12 -0800

The spacing on your apostrophe seems a tad off. This font sure is pretty.

It seems that the top arch

mila — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 08:20:18 -0800

It seems that the top arch of the “r” is too long, there’s a lot of white space below it. When the “r” is between two vertical letters (“i”and “l”, for instance, as in “girl”), the black and the white areas don’t look very well balanced. Maybe the “r” can be narrower. On the other hand, the “w” look darker than the other letters - shouldn’t it be wider?
I also think that this lovely Beatles song will look better with smaller commas...

I think that the lowercase c

Chipman223 — Fri, 8 Feb 2008 06:13:48 -0800

I think that the lowercase c and a are the strongest characters i see. There’s something about the curves on the top that I feel should be mirrored in the ear of the lowercase r, h, et cetera. The lowercase t is really tall. Most faces have the t actually lower than the tittle on the lowercase i, and the h, k, l and f higher. On a lot of faces, the lc l is higher than the uppercase I.

It seems that the caps almost look like you’re trying to make them monospaced, especially the M. Try to rely more on optics than precise measurements. This is something i’m trying to get out of as well.

The letterspacing that you have for your main image (where it just says Antarctica) works much better than on your pdf for test 2.

I think it’s a very interesting typeface, i think it’s somewhere between Verdana and Univers. I will look forward to what becomes of it!

Can’t write a lenghty

Quincunx — Mon, 4 Feb 2008 09:02:54 -0800

Can’t write a lenghty reply right now, but what I see right away is that the b doesn’t look right to me. I quickly traced it and fiddled with it, and I think you can either flip the bowl horizontally, or rotate your q and flip its bowl horizontally as well. I think the latter looks best. It will beed a bit of tweaking after rotating/flipping ofcourse.

Haha thanks for mentioning

HaleyFiege — Sun, 3 Feb 2008 20:32:33 -0800

Haha thanks for mentioning that :)

The baseline jumping I had

fontplayer — Sun, 3 Feb 2008 19:32:16 -0800

The baseline jumping I had mentioned, cleared up when I noticed the file opened at 95.7% for some reason. When set to 100% it looked fine.

Okay I just posted an update

HaleyFiege — Sun, 3 Feb 2008 19:31:25 -0800

Okay I just posted an update up yonder at the top. Test2.pdf
I just did the lower case for now. I’d like to get that nice and tight before fixing all the capitals.

I need to finish kerning it still, and I think there are some consistency issues on the pqbdg letters, s is still too thin...

Can I get your opinions on the e? Does it stick out in a bad way?

I’m working on new

HaleyFiege — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 17:16:36 -0800

I’m working on new proportions. I’ll try and update the pdf this weekend.

I Googled for your next font

Thomas Phinney — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:32:02 -0800

I Googled for your next font and found nothing but boring photos....

:-D

Ricardo Cordoba — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:50:09 -0800

:-D

I’m tricky like that. My

HaleyFiege — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:16:19 -0800

I’m tricky like that.

My next font is going to be called “Anna Kournikova Nude”

I was just browsing the new

Ricardo Cordoba — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:26:35 -0800

I was just browsing the new posts and thought “Antarctica? Who’s posting about typography in Antarctica? I have to see this....”

Ha! I did the exact same thing.

Thanks guys! I’ll post an

HaleyFiege — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 07:23:39 -0800

Thanks guys! I’ll post an update in a bit.

If you can get narrow and

William Berkson — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 07:02:55 -0800

If you can get narrow and happy, more power to you. I think it’s a good idea. As of now, to me it looks too much like an artificially narrowed or ’squooshed’ face. It has a ’reversed contrast’ look even though it may not be geometrically if you measure it. To look equal the verticals have to be thicker than the horizontals, and the vertical rounds have to be thicker than the vertical stems.

If you *want* to go for a reversed contrast look, compare Antique Olive or the typefaces of Evert Bloesma, especially FF Balance and Legato. A narrow face that works very well for readability is Gerard Unger’s Vesta, though it is very neutral, and not what you are going for.

Also, your straight-to-round curves are often lumpy. At this point getting the weights and shapes good is probably more important, but down the road these should be worked on as this sleek style calls for a high polish.

I know you can do ’happy’ wonderfully well from your fat and happy typeface. This has promise, and is worth working on, but does have a way to go to get what you are aiming at.

Some of the characters seem

Quincunx — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 05:52:36 -0800

Some of the characters seem smaller. It seems your overshoot isn’t very consistent. Consider adding overshoot to:
- bowl of the a
- bottom of the bowl of the b
- bottom of the c
- bottom of the bowl of the d
- top of the g
- top of the m (compare to n)
- bowl of the p
- bottom of the u

Lower the crossbar of the f, it’s above the x-hight. I would lower the waist of the k slightly, as well. The s is falling to the left. The y is fine, but you could try what happens if you let the two strokes of the y meet on the baseline.

I agree with Thomas about the caps. They are ok on themselves, but compared to the lowercase, they do seem to be somewhat narrow. Also the dots on the i, the period and the comma are very large.

Antarctica

HaleyFiege — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 20:13:08 -0800

This is a new typeface I’m working on. A happy looking san-serif. I’m looking forward to hearing what you all have to say about it.
I’m not done the numerals yet so I left them out.