OT Laconic in Progress
I’m trying to understand the ins and outs of producing proper OpenType fonts. And it’s looking like a damned long, time consuming process.
So I am just throwing this font out there…
http://www.woodardworks.com/type13.html
I’ll post new versions as I process whatever advice and critique you typophiles might generously provide.
Laconic is my attempt at the basics. A super simple physical design in three weights with as many OT features as I could deal with. They all work on my system (mac) but I’m sure they still need a lot of work to conform to proper cross platform OT code.
I started playing with the physical design of Laconic while reading some of the bitmap pixel font threads. After a while I backed off the idea of making an actual pixel font (way too confining) and designed a font that only LOOKED like it conformed to a really tight grid. I tried to keep curves and diagonals down to a bare minimum and still be legible.
I know it’s dry but I think it has a little bit of charm and it’s a great place to start with the whole OT features programming thing.
20.Sep.2007 1.56pm
Robby,
Pretty cool. It is not as exciting as some of your other faces, but it works. The capital C stood out to me, I think the hook at the top terminal is a little out of place, or clunky. Also the 3 and 8 feel a little awkward. When I was working on numerals, I tried like, 3 variations of each, to try to fit them with the rest of the alphabet.
I hear you about the OT programming. I’m a beginner with type design, but I love it. I’m still in school, so it’s hard to devote that kind of time on a side project.
Your website is pretty flashy; pun intended. I like the animated logos, it adds character to them. I was thinking, it looks like you are a Flash master, so it shouldn’t be too hard for you to learn OpenType features.
Best wishes,
Terrance
20.Sep.2007 4.37pm
its really nice the c reminds of rotis i like it. only thing i can say is that quark doesn’t support stylistic alternates some people put them under swashes or contextual alternates. its annoying. all the other features work fine on my system.
21.Sep.2007 9.22am
Nice work, I like the bold - it has a good presence. If it was designed with screen use in mind (as pixel fonts are) you may need to address some of the hinting problems.
M
22.Sep.2007 12.40am
Re: OpenType... Be mindful of your feature order, and keep it consistent among the weights. Putting fractions at the end of the chain means that activating any other feature that substitutes figures will override the fractions. If that’s not desired, you could simply move ’frac’ further up in the ranks. Another option would be to include the tabular and oldstyle figures within the fraction substitutions.
24.Sep.2007 9.52am
Hinting seems to work pretty well in my apps. I’m not really trying to make it a true screen font.
I did find a couple feature order problems and fixed them. I didn’t realize the order was critical. Also I put the frac feature above sups and sinf in all three.
Thanks for the feedback!