A geometric upright Italic is something I’ve never seen before, but I would definitely like to. This sort of thing seems to lend itself well to a humanist touch, but I’d love to see it done in a more machinated, geomtetric way. Not exactly sure what applications it could be used for — maybe captions or footnotes?

I think something similar is in Underware auto.

You can also try to ’open’ the loop, something like this:

Thanks for the Auto link.

Re: open loops, I considered that, but I thought a big open loop might push it further into the handwriting look than I wanted, and a small loop’s counter wouldn’t work in smaller sizes.

Thanks to you both for the ideas and encouragement.

The question about a distinctive feature is always: how does it relate to everything else? You only know when you design the other letters.

As an example, look at the recent ’Rocky’ of Matthew Carter. I usually don’t like pointy ’a’s, but here the way he relates it to everything else—compare the c and r—makes it work beautifully on this display font. It might not work so well in a text font, being too sparkly, but here it gives a very agreeable and lively bite to headlines.