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Just Getting Started, looking for a little advice
Posted by ag_alt in
28 Mar 2004 — 10:10am
28 Mar 2004 — 10:10am
Hello, I am about to begin work on my first typeface. This will be a digitization of the letters that my grandfather drew on Christmas cards and the like. It's sort of a Bodoni-esque style filtered threw my grandpa's congenital hand tremor.
The reason I am posting is this: I have enough experience in other things to know that there are usually important questions to ask one's self at the outset of a project like this. Having zero experience in making a typeface, I don't know that I'm asking myself enough questions, or the right ones, or all of them.
My question for you is this: from your experience, what are the major and minor considerations for creating a typeface based on the sample posted below?
Thank you very much,
Alex G.
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28 Mar 2004 — 10:36am
I think the main question to answer in such a design is how you will balance faithfulness to the original against typographic integrity.
hhp
1 Apr 2004 — 11:12am
As I get further into this, I'm understanding better what you meant by balancing faithfulness to the original and typographic integrity. I find myself making a lot of decisions. Right now I'm looking for this balance as I sketch the forms of the caps in Illustrator.
Here's about as far as I've gone. At this point I'm interested in comments that could help make this useful.
1 Apr 2004 — 11:31am
Charming... and authentic so far.
:-)
Some of the curvy letters might need some optical adjustments.
For instance: the O
1 Apr 2004 — 12:20pm
That's outstanding.
Some suggestions: give the serifs a little more weight on some of the glyphs. For instance, your grandpa's N in Nation has very pronounced serifs.
Also, and I know this is somewhere in the future, but I'd love to see an italic version, such as he used in "for a year." Good stuff!
1 Apr 2004 — 1:03pm
You're right, this is very close to Didot. I'd been looking at a version of Bodoni for guidance, but there were some differences between it and the character of my grandpa's letters that I had to work around. Didot is a much closer fit.
And thanks for your comments. This is my first typographic effort, and it's more difficult than I expected. I feel encouraged. Ultimately I'd like to do the italic, and also an outline version of the capitals.
17 Apr 2004 — 10:47am
Well, I haven't given up yet. I do need some critical guidance though: I've been trying to reconstruct the lower case using a combination of g'pop style and didot. I'm particularly concerned with the letters: a, e, and especially g.
The 'g' is driving me nuts: sticking to the principle that this font is a version of didot as imagined by an 80-something retired architect with a hand tremor, I've decided that a binocular 'g' is not something he would have done. I've also decided that using an uppercase 'g' in the lowercase isn't something that I want to do. I think the best approach is to didonicize a cursive g, which is what I've been trying to do with very little success. Any suggestions would be very welcome.
Another concern: I read somewhere that having many anchor points in a font outline creates problems with computer printers, etc. Is this style a problem? Or is this a concern that belongs to several years back when things weren't quite as robust?
Current samples:
<img>
<img>
17 Apr 2004 — 10:50am
Okay, Current samples:
19 Apr 2004 — 9:46am
Oh, and please ignore the spacing. I'm not at that stage yet, I just pasted this thing together!
1 Apr 2004 — 12:30pm
I agree with John ... I do like the N is NATION more than the one in NASAL. I agree with Nicolai's comment about the O as well. The R in HONOR seems a little too droopy. The B might be a little narrow, or maybe the E is too wide?
This is fun, reminds me of Didot. You might reference Didot on a few of these characters. I really d like the warmth of it, reminds me of old movie titles.