I always wanted to build a retro condensed font. Given FontStruct's angular possibilities, it is not the easiest style to work with. However, the tall and slender letters have a special allure that designers can hardly resist. They evoke fond memories of vintage text styles from the 1960s and 70s. Retro condensed fonts are widely used for headlines, titles, signage, and branding.

Salice Sans is a low-poly incarnation of the common retro condensed type, and as such, it is rare. Constructing letters with slanted parts (A, N, M, V, W, X, Y) was especially challenging. I learned a good deal by iterating on those letters and getting closer to the optimal shapes.

Work in Progress.

@Bryndan W. Meyerholt: Thank you for your comment and rating. Salice is Italian for slender, willowy. It is pronounced as sa·li·che, similar to the brand name Versace. 

@kassymkulov: Thank you. It took me two and a half months to get to this level because of the summer heatwaves. It is difficult to do any creative work when your brain is cooked.

@Gr4ftY (groan): Thank you for your comment. The strokes of the capitals are one brick thicker than those of the lowercase. I wasn't sure about the balance. A few capital letters feel too strong, even after modifications. FontStruct's Preview is not the best option for fine-tuning. I prefer to install the font and print out sample texts. I guess the inktraps should be reworked and made more uniform. The M and N likewise. Let's see what I can do. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. 

@Rob Meek: Thank you very much for the Top Pick. (Your comment is not visible here, but the pink star is.)

@Dmitriy Sychiov (Sychoff): Thank you.

@Gr4ftY (groan): Thank you. Last night I reworked the ink traps for all letters concerned (A, M, N, V, W, Y, etc.). I believe they look better than before. I need to print out some samples and check. The low-poly theme is trending. I wrote a short piece about it at Mithrandir and gave a list of low-poly fonts. I didn't use the term “low-poly” there, however. I think FontStruct is particularly well-suited for this theme, and I plan to build more low-poly fonts.

@four: Thank you for your feedback. I studied a few tall and slim fonts, and learned how to manage tight spaces or extreme angles. I'll make a few sample pics later.

PS.: Where is Elmo? Does anybody know it?

I have updated the following glyphs: N, v, w, and 7. The capital N is a bit wider and feels more natural. The lowercase w looked especially feeble; it gained a bit of girth in the mid-section. Number seven is slightly thinner now. These modifications are hardly noticeable, yet important steps towards balance and harmony.

@Bryndan W. Meyerholt (BWM): That's a very good point. It should be the same-size single dot, indeed. The dots of the diaeresis can be smaller. What about the middle dot for Catalan?

@Bryndan W. Meyerholt (BWM): Thank you for your comment. You dropped a pebble into my calm and settled pond and stirred up a lot of things. As a result, I made the dot the same size across the font, redesigned the comma/apostrophe and the period, and resized the arrows. After all these modifications, I learned the following:

In professional type design, the dot on the i (called a tittle) should usually not be the exact same size as the diacritic dot above on Ė and Ż. Although both are dots, they serve different visual and structural roles. The tittle on a lowercase i is an integral part of the letterform itself. Because it sits directly over a thin, single vertical stem, it is often digitally and optically adjusted to match or slightly exceed the stem's thickness to remain highly legible at small sizes. (source: Wikipedia)

Multinational typography has so many fine details to consider. Thus, I restored the original dots for the i and j.

@Bryndan W. Meyerholt (BWM): Yes, I tested that version too. It didn't look good. Overall, the current design of Salice Sans is more consistent than Arial Narrow Bold or Impact.

Next: I need a pretty ogonek.

I asked a rhetorical question: Do polygonal fonts represent neo-cubism in typography? The short answer is no. 

I was inspired by the angular typeface designs of Vojtěch Preissig, who was a representative of the Czech Cubist movement in the 1920s. However, Cubism is more complex than just polygonal shapes. It focuses on breaking an object apart and reassembling it in an abstracted, layered form. It often utilises varied planes, intersecting colours, and shifted perspectives to show a single letter from multiple angles at once. Cubism also saw a revival in art and experimental typography, producing remarkable works, mostly colour fonts, recently (I'm sorry I can't give examples because of copyright issues).

Salice Sans - character set. The following languages are supported: English, German, French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Basque, Catalan, Galician, Icelandic, Faroese, Croatian, Montenegrin, Slovene, Albanian, Kurdish, Turkish, Turkmen, Tagalog, Indonesian, Afrikaans, Swahili, Somali, Wolof, Zulu. 

@Bryndan W. Meyerholt (BWM): Yes, indeed. Thank you for checking.

For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Matthew 5:18