FontStruct | FontStruction Feed: Diamond Plate

Comment from Goatmeal

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Comment from Abneurone Fluid Types

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Impressive. But i think it would have been even more impressive if you could have made real lowercase in the style of the overall. These outlined pixellised characters seem to come from another font, in my humble opinion. OUt of that, i love it.

Comment from Frodo7

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Fantastic new font inspired by the pattern of diamond plate. Great demo pic. The lower case set looks more like a separate font of the same family. Having two full set of characters, numbers, etc. would be better, than mixing them in one font. Congratulations. 10/10

Comment from Goatmeal

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

@Neurone Error & @Frodo7 - Thanks for the kind (and helpful) words! Yes, I was at a loss as to what to do with the lower case. Because of pattern dictates, it leaves precious little room for any sort of fine detail of the type that Neurone Error loves so much (see the current # and * here as examples; you have to squint to see them). With little negative space that could contribute to effective letterforms, I'm afraid that a true lowercase would simply be blobs of pattern. That being said, I will probably take the Solomon approach and split the font into two distinct sets. Thanks again to you both for the spot-on suggestions!

Comment from will.i.ૐ

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Gm! I agree with your assessment of the lowercase challenge with this set. Here are some suggestions: • Add unicase alternates in the lc, with or without ascenders/descenders matching the x-height to the cap height. Here are some fontstructed examples:

Brain Freeze Fungal Rounded Dutch

• Go with a very large x-height (say 4/5 of the cap height) and stick to single-story forms for a and g. Remaining problematic glyphs, including e and s, need thinned horizontal strokes (maybe just the middle one) on the order of two rows of diamonds instead of three. I love the numerals – especially 1 and 2 with their manly upticks. Your 5 demonstrates how apparent negative space starts to vanish when only one row of diamonds is left out. Still lovely, though. :)

Comment from Goatmeal

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

@will.i.ૐ -- Thanks for the kind words and great suggestions! I have included the original pattern below, zoomed in so you can see the detail as well as show why there are three rows of diamonds. I do like the unicase idea and can see how removing one row will help make things easier for a set of lowercase letters. I do plan on working on the LC in the near future. I've been used to making 8×8 or 16×16 fonts for quite some time now. However, this one had me doing lots of scrolling, so I'm just going to take a little break for now... :^)

Comment from Goatmeal

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Comment from meek

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Congratulations! FontStruct Staff have deemed your FontStruction worthy of special mention. “Diamond Plate” is now a Top Pick.

Comment from Goatmeal

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

@meek: Rob, thank you for the Top Pick -- as always, it is greatly appreciated!

Comment from R160signage

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

How long did it take you to do that @_@... It looks like you put a S*** load of work into this! 5[00] stars!!

Comment from Goatmeal

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

@R160signage: Thank you for the kind words. Yes, it did take a while, but not why you'd think; the preparation was actually the hardest part... Taking a cue from MC Escher, I wanted a repeating pattern. I created the initial four diamonds (above) but pared them down to a mere square (below). I had a difficult time determining how I wanted the letters to look. Taking the easy way out, I made a simple 5x7 font. Treating the square like a pixel block, I proceeded to build each character. Then, after all of the squares were in place, I went back and copy-pasted the diamond pattern over each one. Extremely tedious, yes, but the template of squares made it SO much easier because I didn't have to worry about any pattern misalignments. If I had built each letter from scratch using only the diamond pattern, it would have been that much more difficult trying to keep things lined up! Since I am used to making pixel fonts that are only ~8 blocks high, this font was a challenge because it's 138 blocks tall. I am working on a rather old computer where the best resolution is only 1280 x 1024, so this one caused me a lot of scrolling up and down -- something I'm not used to when using FontStruct...

Comment from Goatmeal

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000