My new font

Gallery
1

I tried experimenting with having a vertical that spreads out slightly at each end. I started with the verticals of an h and then I tried an o and then I tried some variants on the o as components for h, p and d and then I completed the h and then gradually my experimenting looked ike it was moving towards becoming a font rather than just an experiment.

Some of the components that I produced are stored in empty, unmapped, cells at the end of the font.

So, I thought that I would upload the first stage to the forum. The font does not have a finalized name yet, hopefully I will think of something that seems appropriate.
QQQQ_001.TTF (5.87 KB)
Comments are welcome. I sometimes wonder if my fonts are too … , what one might call “mechanical” and that perhaps need some sort of slight irregularity to make them effective.

William Overington

24 January 2011

2

I added four more glyphs this afternoon, namely q, t, a and s.

The font now contains the following mapped glyphs.

EHILPabcdehlmnopqrstu

I took some time deciding how high to make the lowercase t. It seems to me that lowercase t is meant to be not much taller than x-height. I have previously, with other fonts, tended to make a lowercase t maybe as tall as a lowercase h, or maybe make it at capital height.

This is an art project in progress. I find it interesting that the font was only started this morning and yet now has over half of the lowercase alphabet and is available around the world.

The glyphs that I have produced so far are mostly the vertical ones and the round ones. I am trying to think out how to make the angled glyphs, such as v, w, x, y and z as I would like to try to keep the slight spread at the end of the straight lines, yet wonder how this will look with, say, v and w, when the ends of two straight lines meet at an angle.
QQQQ_002.TTF (6.27 KB)
Many thanks to those readers who have downloaded a copy of the font.

William Overington

24 January 2011

3

Early yesterday evening I produced QQQQ 003, by adding glyphs for v, y, w and x.
QQQQ_003.TTF (7.64 KB)
After uploading QQQQ 001 to the forum I started a notes file, making notes as I proceeded.

Here is a transcript of those notes.

--------- Start of transcript

Monday 24 January 2011

3:12 pm

QQQQ_001.TTF has been uploaded to the forum.

Open QQQQ_001.TTF and save as QQQQ_002.TTF QQQQ 002.

At present the font has the following mapped glyphs.

EHILP

bcdehlmnopru

That is 5 capitals and 12 lowercase.

Try a q.

Try a t.

Try an a.

Try an s.

6:00 pm

Open QQQQ_002.TTF and save as QQQQ_003.TTF QQQQ 003.

Try a v.
Make a component glyph that is 32 font units higher and 32 font units lower, thus 64 font units longer in total.
Try rotating by angles about top left corner until a good result is obtained.

-6 degrees is not enough.

-7 degrees looks promising.

Try a y by making a line 512 font units and another 16 font units longer than the previous example and rotating that by 7 degrees about the top right corner.

That rotated component looks good. However, a more rotated left side is needed than for the v.

-8 degrees is not enough.

-9 degrees looks promising.

Try a w by combining two copies of v. The right one was moved 192 font units to the left.

For the x, try making the pre-rotation component another 64 font units lower, though not higher.

Try a -16 degrees rotation.

Keep the -16 degrees rotation and try lengthening the pre-rotation component at the lower end until the lower right corner rotates to have an x value of 464 font units. This took several tries and the result was that the lower end was at -118 font units.

--------- End of transcript

William Overington

25 January 2011