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I have no clue
This is my first attempt at a font. These are the only glyphs I've made so far. Should I abstain from making fonts for the good of humanity, or is there some slight potential in these forms?
 frimbo0a.pdf (7.9 k) |
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22 Dec 2004 — 1:11pm
I'm not very good with bezier curves and I can't seem to get the subtlty that I want without the forms looking fuzzy. Also, for some reason the dot on the "i" looks hollow unless you zoom in.
22 Dec 2004 — 1:59pm
Based on this doodle
22 Dec 2004 — 2:45pm
Goals: well, I've always wanted to make a font. One that is atypical, functional, and not ugly.
Niche: I haven't a clue.
Inspiration: The doodle I posted above, drawn in my notebook during a discussion of Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies in a seminar on literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Frimbo is the conjure-man's name.
Basically, I feel a strange attraction to the forms of the alphabet and want to create. This font is a learning experiment but I'd like the finished product to be worth the effort of learning. I am a bit discouraged, wondering if the characters I've created so far look like they belong together and are well formed. If I can manage it I want to build a font with at least display, light, book, and black weights. And a full character set. But if it is mediocre (or just plain bad) then I don't want to spend the time creating a full range for a bad font.
22 Dec 2004 — 7:28pm
OK. I've made some changes and I'm feeling better about it but I'm still not sure where I'm going with this, so any criticism, advice, encouragement, discouragement--feedback of any kind, would be appriciated.
frimbo0b.pdf (8.7 k)
22 Dec 2004 — 8:11pm
The serifs remind me of those in various hanzi/kanji characters in the Song style. Your typeface could fit in well with them in bilingual headlines, etc. I think you should continue with it.
23 Dec 2004 — 4:38am
Noah, one first thing you could try is to give the letters a similar finish. See how odd it looks when you have the H next to the E. You have at least three different styles of serif there. The serifs shouldn't be exactly the same in all letters, but they should harmonize.
After that, you can work on the structures of the letters. I see that you've made all letters the same width, but that leaves you with a excessively wide I, and a narrow H.
23 Dec 2004 — 10:03am
Huh. An H is two I's with a bar between them. Amazing that I never really noticed that before. Probably because it is not the case with handwriting. Anyway. Version c. frimbo0c-56557.pdf<font class="dontLookLikeCrap">Huh. An H is two I's with a bar between them. Amazing that I never really noticed that before. Probably because it is not the case with handwriting. Anyway.
<b>EDIT: Wrong Attachment</b>
23 Dec 2004 — 10:06am
Right Attachment
frimbo0c.pdf (8.3 k)
23 Dec 2004 — 12:34pm
The cap widths look a bit weird because you are not following either tradition. One is the classical which makes some within a square and some in half a square (roughly). For this see Trajan and Futura. There the T E F is narrow and the H wide. In the 19th century they went for more similar width, so the E and H would be more similar width. Here you have a narrow T and a wide E, which looks strange.
There are no rules, just what you can make work. I like the idea for the serifs, but you might look at different caps that you like for inspiration on how to adjust their widths.
23 Dec 2004 — 4:08pm
WB, thanks for the pointers, I've adjusted the widths, does it feel bettern now? This is a hell of a lot more time consuming/involving than I thought it would be.
frimbo0d.pdf (12.6 k)
22 Dec 2004 — 2:17pm
What are your goals for this typeface design? What niche do you think it will fill? What inspired it?