FontStruct | FontStruction Feed: empyreus

Comment from intaglio

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

More brick scaling and stacking. The scaling allows for curvature that can't be achieved otherwise.

Comment from thalamic

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

Oh yes! Very nice the gentle slip-slide of the 'b' curve, the Victorian furnituresque 'x', and the clean pixel view. Matching uppercase are on the way, I hope?

Comment from intaglio

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

Yes! It usually augurs well when I'm unreservedly enjoying the progress. (I was only half-heartedly paying attention to the Olympics.) Though not always! Different rocks to negotiate with an upper case... I shall try the old handgloves on to see how that goes. I love FontStruct. I'd love it more if I could just have some teensy weensy triangly fragments. Hint hint.

Comment from thalamic

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

You finished the uppers and the rest. That was fast! It was your hey presto font. :) I especially like the 7. It is just the right amount of non-conformist. Also, is the G a brick too narrow or is it just me?

Comment from intaglio

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

You're right, the G and others are too narrow. I'm caught between a rock and a hard place. The file features a somewhat efficient grid-size, which means I can't do -- say -- a half-step sideways. It's a full brick's width or nothing. Open the glyph(s) up by a brick's width and suddenly it's too wide. It would be okay if I didn't have to accommodate that rounded shoulder. But it has to fall within the grid not across it. Damn. It's mitigated somewhat by the fact that the C and G are open forms. You know, optical space, blah blah. Some of the other glyphs are marginally too wide, so it all sort of comes out in the wash. Apart from my teensy triangle obsession, my other item on the wish list is (individually!) scaleable bricks. It would be nice to have my cake and eat it. A nice, fine grid for stroke weight subtleties combined with individual bricks (i.e. the curves) that are double or triple the x/y of everything else. Then I'd be happy. I really would.

Comment from intaglio

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

Actually, maybe I can achieve a bit of sleight-of-hand by moving the crossbar over. I'm going to go away and try that. Later: I think this is quite a good solution. Well, a disguise, anyway. The top loop still looks a bit cramped, but.

Comment from thalamic

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

I, too, come across the optical width problem a lot. It was most evident in Send. I could never get it just right. Then I just gave up. Your G looks happier now. Maybe if you used the diagonal from the D on G, the optical width problem will go away. In other words, modify the D to make the G, not the C. And while on the subject of bricks and grids, not just individually scalable bricks, but brick placement across grid boundaries in quarter brick steps--leading to a non-modular modular fontstruct. It's true isn't it: Humans are never satisfied. heh

Comment from thalamic

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

Oooh! I just noticed the double waterfall of the B. Verrrrry nice! :) The Z looks like a 2, though.

Comment from kix

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

i agree with thalamic on that suggestion for "G". that "D" fall bow thing would look good on it.

Comment from kix

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

*same for "O" and "Q" :)

Comment from Stewf

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

Very original, intaglio. Well done. Would love to see a sample image if anyone has a moment.

Comment from intaglio

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

Okay, I shall go away and try those suggestions. But not now. I want to watch the women's walk and I can't multitask. I don't know that I want to make all the bowls conform. I'm in two minds. Part of the charm in block setting is the irregularity. If I homogenize it, some of the quirkiness may be lost. I might clone an alternate so I can um and ah about it. (It will be interesting to see if I've got the attempt at italic formatting right. I don't know about any of this sort of stuff. )

Comment from thalamic

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

The intaglio Experience

Comment from intaglio

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

Phew. I'm knocked out. Thanks Williaum for the nicely set sample of Empyreus. And Thalamic -- gosh, that must have been a bit of a mission. I can't download my fonts to my home computer because I don't have a zip utility to unzip the files. Pathetic, I know. I'm not supposed to do dangerous things like load unregulated (gasp!) fonts onto my work computer so I haven't sampled many of them. So thanks, Thalamic. It's exciting to see them all. My oh my I've been a busy boy.

Comment from thalamic

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

Sorry the image got squished. You can view the undistorted version here, if you like. It's not much better, but the typefaces are more legible.

Comment from intaglio

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

I like the new G but I still like the old one too... I think I'm going to leave it at that. Making the 0 and Q conform as well tips the whole thing; it draws into question even more glyphs which then stand out as needing "fixed". Before you know it we have a completely different creature. I can see I'm going to have to download all my fonts to my work computer, decompress but not load them, and put the resultant TT files onto a CD to take home. I could get myself a zip utility. But that would be too easy for me.

Comment from kix

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

awesome font catalogue dude! for the picture: i found out this page automatically scales pics to a width of 380 pixels. From the start saving your pics in that width will solve the problem of distortion. but, thank you for uploading another one :) finally, once again intaglio, keep up the good work. this path seems to be the right one for you!

Comment from intaglio

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

@williaum: Kern pairs. Yes, a lot of my fonts exhibit lamentable kerning sins. I'm stuck in a catch-22: I've got InDesign on my work computer but don't feel inclined to waste company time fiddling about with my fonts; at home I do all the work on them but don't have InDesign! MS Word circa 1995 doesn't quite cut it, somehow. I dearly wish I had InDesign at home but I can't justify forking out over $1,000 for a program that I'd only be using in a recreational capacity. It's one of the reasons I love FontStruct. It's free!

Comment from typerider

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

Must have overlooked it the last time, but there is indeed something very good and particular happening with the curves here. Nice! And it reads fairly good in text. As for the kerning capabilities… I am not inclined to taking FontStructions to the level of font designing you would achieve in software like FontLab. Structions will always be modular. But that is my personal attitude and all the respect for your work. I would care more about a second scale of cicular elements for instance. Bricks to make up a circle that is 8x8 blocks or so… That's what I am missing. Peter

Comment from intaglio

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

@typerider: thanks for your comment. Yes, I too lust for bigger curve bricks. I wonder how Rob would fit them in the toolbox! My fantasy is a brick customiser with filters a la Illustrator: bezier style handles that you could pull in various directions, but would still snap to the grid. In my dreams, I said. I haven't used any typographical software before so anything that lets me make fonts is great in my books.

Comment from intaglio

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

@williaum, re the l/c f: yes, perhaps it's a bit too much of an affectation to have it flick off jauntily to the left like that. Particularly if it interferes with legibility. I shall either put it in school uniform like all the others, or make it even more outrageously affected by extending it past the baseline! I'll have to see if it's just too dominant in a text stream... how often does f crop up in a block of text? If I was a statistician I'd have my lookup charts out. Seeing your lovely graphic(s) I wonder if the cap A and R are a bit like identical twins. Though I don't fancy the fix, which would either be to pull in the bottom bowl of the R to make a more pronounced curve or shift the bowl one brick to the left. No forget it, that's a horrible idea. What to do...

Comment from intaglio

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

Thanks, Williaum! I shall do it! At the moment I'm trying to get my head around Typetool which I've just bought, and very exciting it is too. So my output on FontStruct is going to nosedive for a while, which is probably no bad thing... I've opened Fuego, a(relatively) simple font of mine as a Typetool file, and I've optically kerned it so it looks pretty good, but now I can't figure out how to get Typetool to export it as a .ttf and include the kerning info. The manual is a formidable thicket, I've yet to make much sense of it. Steep, steep learning curve for a more-or-less non technical sort of guy. I find the possibility of altering the nodes of a font like Empyreus, to make it subtly less monoline, a carrot too tantalising to stay in my comfortable ignorance over. Trying to use Typetool increases my respect for FontStruct, if that were possible. It's such a formidable thing for a newbie whereas FontStruct is childsplay -- and a joy -- to use. Congratulations Mr Meek, my admiration and appreciation just keeps increasing.

Comment from Axel Leyer

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

Hi Intaglio...Lovely font I like very much these curves I know is an "old" font but... you know...so much fontstructors & fontstructions out there.... Good work as usual :)