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'Casca' – Rounded condensed humanist
Posted by acascade in
8 Apr 2012 — 12:23am
8 Apr 2012 — 12:23am
Hello Typophiles,
I'm aiming for something quirky and light hearted. My approach was to design a rounded face which has some humanist character and a little bit of contrast between sharp and soft. There's influences from Gill, DIN and Futura in there.
Unothodoxly, soft edges have been used around the perimeter and straight lines on the horizontal terminals (e.g the tips of the r, l, t and s). My thinking was this would give a nice soft shape to the outline of the word, whilst allowing letters to sit tightly together harmoniously without awkward negative space. I.e. this: || not this: )|
This is my first font so I'd appreciate your comments!
Cheers,
Pete
...FYI this is the second revision. PDF is attached.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| CASCA V2.pdf | 280.27 KB |
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8 Apr 2012 — 5:26am
Make up your mind.
8 Apr 2012 — 5:48am
Similar designs (the first ones that come to my mind, there are several others*):
Miso (http://martennettelbladt.se/miso/)
Phylum (http://typophile.com/node/89023)
* see, for example, here: http://www.typophile.com/node/81027#comment-459522
8 Apr 2012 — 6:15am
Actually Jasper I would say that the only hope this design has of avoiding irrelevance is to be eclectic, even PoMo (but not the old hooliganism of the 90s).
hhp
8 Apr 2012 — 12:18pm
There doesn't appear to be any rationale for the mixture of flat and rounded termini. Some bottoms are flat, some rounded, as are other random stroke ends.
Many of the glyphs were put together with pieces (was this done with fontstruct?) that don't always fit together properly. The PDF example shows gaps at some magnifications. This also causes mis-alignment at some magnifications (the 'a' shows its vertical parts at different widths, for example, with a pixel or two difference on-screen)
The connections between curved and straight strokes are inconsistant - the 'h' is markedly different from the 'n' for example. Most of the glyphs have a constant stroke width, so those that are markedly different tend to stand out like sore thumbs.
I'm not sure what characteristics make a character 'male' or 'female' or 'neuter'; or even humourous, comical, or serious! I don't tend to either laught at or fantasize about glyphs.
- Herb
10 Apr 2012 — 2:01pm
Thanks for your feedback guys.
Yes ecclectic is what I'm going for – my aim isn't to produce a generic rounded font. The type was drawn from scratch in illustrator with a few bits borrowed across letters (hence the slightly sketchy stitching). The new version I've uploaded is more refined.
There is some thinking behind the round/straight edges, I've edited my original post to explain things.
What are your thoughts?
10 Apr 2012 — 2:07pm
Could you elaborate on what PoMo is?
Ta :)
10 Apr 2012 — 3:47pm
PoMo = post-modern. So unencumbered by Modernism's delusion concerning Regularity.
One thing I would suggest is to look at letter adjacency frequencies*. What I mean is you should try to manage the distribution of rounds versus flats depending on what is most likely to end up next to what.
* http://typophile.com/node/5106
hhp
10 Apr 2012 — 5:25pm
Your Version 2 still has stylistic inconsistencies. You say that the horizontal termini are square, but they're still rounded on the y, the crossbar of the t and both ends of the z. The bottom of the 'j' is ambiguous - maybe that's your intention, but it has no equivalent elsewhere in the font. The corner in the 'a' makes it look like a ball ending - again, the only one with that particular appendage.
I'm trying to attach an image of the 'a' at a fairly small size, with the image enlarged to display the break in rendering the separate segments. This was from a screen capture of the pdf as displayed by Acrobat 7 at 25%;
- Herb