I love drawing Z. W usually has me beating my head on my desk.
http://typophile.com/node/44594

I like the hatching on the sides, but the white stroke throws me a little where it is squared off on inside joints. :)

At first glance, I thought “cool!” but then after looking at it a bit, the inside space (the light brown W) looked really wrong, due to the squaring Chipman mentioned.

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eeblet.com

The squaring kind of reminds me of the notches in Bell Centennial. :-)

I love the volume, the shading, and the hint of a serif on either side of the outer strokes.

I think it would be worth playing with the proportions, if you haven’t already.

I would try making the middle peak less heavy than the lower joins. Also you might experiment with the traditional thick-thin-thick-thin pattern to see how it goes with the decorative elements.

Is that Museo modified?

My curiosity is growing, James!
I would very much like to see the finished magazine.

Andrew, you’ve spotted it right :-)
It is Museo 900, not modified (as far as I can see).

Is that Museo modified?

Museo is killer. I’m wishing I had a bunch of freelance jobs just to use it more.

This project is a little irritating, tho. The paths that Illustrator is generating when I start blowing strokes up and converting them to outlines are horrible; I think I need to redo some stuff in Fontlab and start over. If I’m going to keep doing projects with lettering and type manipulation I’ll need to buy a copy of Freehand.

James, I am guessing that when you bold this as a result of the ’strokes’ you have to make it wider, ie, redraw it, in order to restore the balance of the original. Thus, for example, when the two ’V’s are farther apart, the middle peak will be less heavy. This is part of the “joy” of doing different weights of an M or W, with all those diagonal strokes squished in a small span.

William, that’s definitely part of it, but it’s also that the complexity of the curves in the ink traps can get messy in illustrator, and that really makes it hard to work with.

What is the original letterform? the thin black outline?

If so, I’ve found that it’s usually the inside shape is usually what your eye judges. When I do outlined/dimensional letters, what I usually do is (illustrator):
1-outline my text
2-copy and paste the text in back of the original and stroke it to the desired width.
3-with the stroked letterforms, I release the complex paths, and delete the forms I don’t need.

This leaves you with the inside forms (or top layer) as the original type outlines, with a thicker stroke on the outside (or bottom layer). Here’s a quick (poor) example:

By the way, James, if you don’t have it already, Leslie Cabarga’s Font Logo and Lettering Bible might be of some help on this project. He has a whole chapter of “Type Trix” in which he shows how to do all kinds of outlining, shadows and decoration, and some of the pitfalls. I’ve never done any of this, but he seems to know a lot about it.

I’ve found that it’s usually the inside shape is usually what your eye judges.
Sorry, Sometimes redundancy is okay sometimes. Apparently I’ve forgotten how to structure a cohesive sentence.

Chipman, the same effect can be achieved in Illustrator without copying your paths. Just use the appearance window and drag the stroke underneath the fill. You can add as many strokes as you can bear this way, without compromising the shape of your letterform.

use the appearance window and drag the stroke underneath the fill.
Yes, it can be done that way too. Hmm, somehow that never crossed my mind. My main point was to make one of the inner shapes the true letter form, and the black frame an outside stroke.

Sorry to completely dominate your blog post, James.

You can choose whether the stroke is centered on, sits outside or sits inside a shape’s outline by using the stroke panel in Illustrator.

Chris-When you outline that stroke, it will always make it centered. even if you have outside or inside allignment turned on.

“Chris-When you outline that stroke, it will always make it centered. even if you have outside or inside allignment turned on.”

Yes, but if you do Object > Expand appearance it should not.