Any takers?
It’s interesting to me that not only has no one commented here, but no one’s commented in the entire sans-serif section since I put this up. (Aw gosh, guys, is it really that bad?)

I like this. I see more connections to earlier twentieth century style than Optima here.

The s (all of them, but especially lowercase roman) looks too wispy, especially the top - should it taper more quickly, or extend a bit further up, or be a bit wider, or some combination of those?

The bottom right of the italic d needs more weight, I think.

I’m not sold on the roman g. The italic g is gorgeous.

Roman h, n, and u might be a touch too wide?

PDF isn’t displaying properly for me on Mac. Just Carson-esque garble.

I don’t know what to say about a malfunctioning PDF... I generated it with OpenOffice. I’ll see if I can do something else later today. Thanks for the suggestions, Craig. I had figured the situation with the g’s would be the other way around, with the italic the more dubious one. What makes you uneasy with the roman one?

P.S. What’s Carson-esque?

P.S. What’s Carson-esque?

Refers to David Carson’s design of the Brian Ferry article in Raygun.

What makes you uneasy with the roman one?

The proportions seem forced into eccentricity. The top bowl looks like a squinting eye, very tight, while the bottom bowl drips down like a giant hanging tear, very loose. How would it look to enlarge the top bowl a bit and give more structure to the s-shaped line that comes down to form the right side of the lower bowl?

Nice.
I changed some settings in the PDF generation window; maybe this one will work. The lower one is the new one.
I’ll try something like that with the g. Thanks.

I worked on the s. I just made the whole thing a bit wider and more robust. Some better now? (Lower one is newer.)

Hi!

this is indeed a nice work,
specially when we see that you have made it in 2 weeks!!
It takes me months to make my characters.

cool. And somehow it is a style up to whats in the air at the moment to my eyes, too.

Stefan

Some better now? (Lower one is newer.)

It’d be easier to judge in a smaller, text setting as before.

To be fair, I did draw the characters out like a year ago. I just did the digitization in two weeks.

“And somehow it is a style up to whats in the air at the moment to my eyes, too” - I’m having trouble following this, sorry - but it sounds like a compliment, so thanks!

I’ll put out a bit of text with the two s’s sometime today, probably. I’m about to start working on making the character set larger. Shouldn’t take too long.

Attached a pdf with some sample text. Sample text that makes me glad I don’t have a lisp.

I still have the same problem with the s - too slight. Hopefully somebody else will weigh in on this.

I see what you mean. Is it appreciably less frail? I can beef it up a little more, but it’d be good to know if I’m going in the right direction.

Nathanael,

I looked at the gif embedded in the thread, showing the s in context. It’s just light. In the overall context, the change you’ve made is infinitesimal and barely perceptible. look at that gif and how heavy the 2 i’s look on either side.

The top and bottom of s are also the lightest features, tapering off to ’hairline’ thickness where everything else has either a flared stroke terminal or a horizontal feature. So the s looks like it is too short/small, and it also is lighter overall than the others. This is an example of the trickery necessary to get straight, flaring strokes to look visually the same weight as bowls. They can’t all be the same weight in the middle.

The s is also one of the narrowest shapes in the lot, making it look that much smaller. Your r has this problem too, but it also has a standard flaring vertical stem. In any size less than display, I could see the r turning into an i.

The wide range of widths or proportions can be toyed with in display fonts, but you’ll find as you try to use this, that text faces have a narrower range of proportion that still allows reading to occur smoothly.

You haven’t said what this design is intended for. It’s very interesting, as is your other work, but did you have a brief or purpose in mind?

In overall style, I think some things need to be more related: the exaggerated eyes of g, high waist of k, narrow s and r and some of the tapers lean in a comical, display direction. But the eyes of a and e, which are central shapes to a Latin design, are more conventional and sensible, as are the simple, classic proportions of h, p, o, i, B and W. So there’s a dilemma: Make it all more goofy, or all more sensible and conventional? A brief might help with this.

I don’t have any specific use in particular in mind so far—when I draw fonts, I tend to just come up with an idea and then sketch it out, thinking about the letters themselves rather than the future of the font. That’s somewhat a poor way to approach the font, and it’s resulted in some far-reaching changes in the past. In my sketches of Newt, the ascenders are impractically high. Most of the fonts I’ve designed are serif text faces, and such is the case with both the other ones I’ve put up here (Cyril and Newt), so I’ve never really had the problem of unclear purpose before.

I think I want to make Solvejg usable for somewhat long text. I’m realizing that it might be a good idea to make a display version of it and a milder text version. But, I think I will make the g, k, s, and r as you mentioned work better with the (more “sensible”) rest of the font. However, I’m afraid if I normalize them too much I’ll lose character. I guess I’ll save the most flamboyant ideas for the display version.

Thanks—it helped to get clearer about Solvejg’s purpose.

“And somehow it is a style up to whats in the air at the moment to my eyes, too” - I’m having trouble following this, sorry - but it sounds like a compliment, so thanks!

Sorry for my English :-)
I meant that it has a certain style. More classic, a bit handwritten (even if not exactly), things like that.
Those things that in a certain way seem to have sweapt away the futuristic style move form the beginning of 2000.

Stefan

“I think I will make the g, k, s, and r as you mentioned work better with the (more “sensible”) rest of the font. “

Well, I didn’t suggest either direction particularly; you have a choice. But you can do some tests with copies of your current working file, pushing each one in different directions. It might help you decide which direction is the right one. It might turn out that the whole thing needs to be more quirky and clownish, but the best way to know is to try it.

I don’t place a higher value on “sensible”, it’s just a descriptive term.

I meant that I’ll go in that direction because I like that direction. I think it would work well if I pushed it either way, but I personally would like it not to be too loud. The display version might stay fairly quirky, though.

Thanks for the compliment, Stefan!

I think what most surprises me is how surprisingly straight-forward it looks when it’s small, yet zoomed in (or sized up) it shows its character. At least for me when I printed it out the smaller text samples eemed quite formal, yet as we know the design is a bit playful. Any way you can keep that in a single font rather than splitting in two (body v display)?

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

It’s sort of the same reason that they don’t make helicopter cars. They could, but if the thing had to both fly and drive, it wouldn’t be that great at either one. If I wanted a display face and a text face in one, it wouldn’t be that great at either job.

But that’s not to say that the text face will have no character. I’m retaining as much as I can without making it distracting. (I’ve started working on it, but other things have kept me away.)