Hi,

I'd appreciate some feedback on a font I'm designing.

I've had an appreciation of typography for a long time, but this is the first time I've tried to create a font. My wife, a graphic designer, was lamenting her lack of a good lettering font, so I'm hoping to surprise her for Christmas :)

The plan I'm working to is:

• Not a cursive writing style, but...
• ...mustn't look like a comic-book lettering font
• Casual style, obviously handwritten, but not sloppy or childish; perhaps like notes written in a sketchbook
• Reasonable legibility
• Normal weight, written with a pen
• 'Black' weight, written with a fat marker - obviously less casual to improve readability with a fat marker.
• Time permitting, a neater variant, like you might use when filling in a form
• Reasonably full set of glyphs - plenty of punctuation; accented variants of letters as used in French, Spanish, German, Italian, etc; Greek letters; Hopefully a few maths symbols
• OpenType format
• If possible, completed in time for Christmas!

I'm working by drawing the glyphs on paper, and then creating outlines in FontForge; I'm not wanting to buy any expensive tools, and FontForge seems pretty fully featured.

I've attached an image below of where I'm at. I've created most of the lowercase glyphs, but I've not done any tidying, or got the widths or kerning sorted out. Some of the letters (m, n, s) look a little short - or should the rounded letters be a little lower?

I notice that some of the line widths are a rather irregular (I'm thinking of the a, t, and tail of the g); that actually reflects what a Pilot G2 pen does on paper when I write... (perhaps I need more practice!) I'd like to keep the feel of a pen on paper, but I think I'll reduce the contrast of the irregularities to a more reasonable level, so that letters don't stand out.

Is there a list of which glyphs are needed for which languages?

Obviously, this is very much in the early stages, but I'd appreciate any tips, suggestions, constructive criticisms, or observations.

dan