Thank you for your comments.
Lots of tasty illogicalities in your font - why should B have such a large indent when the U has none, and the T with its spike is odd - still, who cares?!
I have not trained as a type designer: my fonts are perhaps what is known as “outsider art”. There are quite possibly things in the designs which a formally trained type designer would know not to do!
- why should B have such a large indent when the U has none, …
The B was designed by adapting a copy of an O.
In my notes, made as I went along, I had the following.
Try a B by adapting a copy of O.
This may need redesigning.
Such a comment, whilst not unique in my notes, is rather unusual.
Sometimes a design so noted does get redesigned later, this time it did not.
I think that I was wondering whether a more conventional B should be designed rather than a direct adaption of an O. The large indent is so as to distinguish the B from a D. The U could not be confused with another letter. I had not thought of comparing the design of the B with the design of the U until you gave me the idea to do so, the U was added several glyphs after the B was added.
…, and the T with its spike is odd -
Yes, I suppose that it could look that way starting with looking at the whole font now that it is published.
Here is a transcript of what happened.
Thursday 5 July 2007
Start a new font Kern Deco 001 in KERND001.TTF.
Use metrics 2048, 0, 0.
Use the A and the V from AV kern test for packages and the disc from Stardisc as the O.
Set space and non-marking return to 2048.
Set .notdef to 2048 wide, solid square.
Kern AV and VA to -768 each.
Kern AO as -256.
Kern OA as -256,
Kern OV and VO as -256.
Try a T by adapting a copy of V.
Which pairs need kerning?
TA at -512
TO no.
TV no.
AT at -512
OT no
VT no
Try a P by adapting a copy of O.
I was learning about kerning and I suppose that I was trying to keep the theme of the triangles used for A and V as much as possible.
It looks like a lot of fun.
Indeed. As I proceeded I did not know how it would turn out. It started with A, V and O and then it was a matter of trying to complete the alphabet in as similar a style as possible.
It was fun producing the font and I find that it is fun when using it because kerning pairs which I put into the font get used. For example, yesterday I used the word ITALIC and the TA kerning pair was used.
The font has 76 kerning pairs within it. Some are potentially so rare as to be almost impossible to use. Yet maybe some of them might be used in practice nonetheless, such as the LW kerning pair in the word ALWAYS, so they are there in case they are needed.
William Overington
25 October 2007