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This font's beveled angles create the illusion of shading and depth.
130 Comments
And I agree with Frodo: it does create a nice Moiré effect at different sizes.
There are some real gems there such as the * and #
Are you going to do a non mono spaced font as an option?
If so I'd decrease the SPACE key to make it just over half the letter width. Also have you thought about making M & W should be wider.
P.S. We've got to stop meeting like this! :)
P.S.: I hope the links work properly.
Because of your tip, I happened to notice that Bevel'sAdvocateMono was shown incorrectly, with spaces separating the three words. I sent them a message yesterday, and this morning they responded that the error has been fixed. I know this was a only small matter, but it was important to me that my font's name be presented properly.
So thanks again for informing us about the exposure of our fonts at instantShift.com!
Because of your tip, I happened to notice that Bevel'sAdvocateMono was shown incorrectly, with spaces separating the three words. I sent them a message yesterday, and this morning they responded that the error has been fixed. I know this was a only small matter, but it was important to me that my font's name be presented properly.
So thanks again for informing us about the exposure of our fonts at instantShift.com!
attempa - Intaglio
encyclic - Intaglio
ameba - kekeh
Cedar - kekeh
ariapenciroman - kix
Bevel'sAdvocateMono - fontcollector
Comitto - jmarquez
Chocobot Stacked - LexKominek
Elspeth - Frodo7
Faramir - Frodo7
Foldstruct - emepar7
Heavy Diacritics - CMunk
hi-fi deco - funk_king
track filled - funk_king
Whipped Cream - funk_king
IR Summer Games - igorrossi
Kunchey - chr.s
Opine Sans Bold - aphoria
Razz - jhejka
RM Romantic - p2pnut
Samoa - Magic Sam
Samoa Ultrabold - Magic Sam
Shadow - Magic Sam
Scanographia - cayo
ThM_Freaktur - thm_go
Congratulations to everyone! Fontstruct is in the mainstream now.
but it's not ready yet!!!
^_^
Congrats to all my fellow FSors.
Let's not forget a big thank you to Captain Meek and his crew for making it possible :)
1. tripwiremagazine.com's "65+ Currently Some of the Best Free Fonts Available!" may have an awkwardly worded title, but I'm still flattered that my work is being displayed there.
2. "50 Best Free Fonts From 2009" appears at creativenerds.co.uk and is similar to other articles on this subject.
3. My font also showed up on a Japanese site named Hatena. There are no graphic samples for the fonts listed there.
For downloading purposes, these three sites link directly to my font's page here at FontStruct.
4. This is not the case, however, for a Russian font archive called eGraphic. It appears that one must register in order to download any fonts or obtain authorship data. Since I don't know the language, I decided not to sign up. But based on the graphic representation of my font, I'm certain they found it at dafont.com, an excellent French archive where I registered it last month.
I apologize for blowing my own horn, but I'm just not accustomed to this kind of attention!
Thanks for your interest, and I hope you'll let me know if this solves the problem.
Anyway, your question inspired me to add the lowercase today, so thanks for giving me the idea. I hope you'll try downloading the new version to see if it works for you!
The monospaced feature, a notable hallmark of your work, still limits the balance you can achieve between characters. Particularly, the balance between the uppercase and small caps seems off. The caps now feel too narrow to me, and characters like L and M feel either too wide or too compressed in both upper and lowercase. Will you tell us more about your intriguing monospaced approach?
I want to acknowledge again what a sizable grid you worked with to create this one. The small caps hint to some very reliable copy>paste>edit techniques allowing one to squash down (or pull and stretch) characters without deforming or destroying their essential corner and intersection details much, if at all.
Still, I've always been somewhat dissatisfied with two or three of the original glyphs, especially the lower-right corner of the N. My first attempt to correct this problem was to increase the width of every glyph. N, K, and R were the main beneficiaries of this move; however, some of the other characters, including X and 8, were far less appealing to me with the wider stance. Also, I was not able to download the new version successfully, due to FontStruct's limitations at the time. So that was the end of that series of revisions.
As FontStruct's ability to handle huge fonts was increased, I began to think that I should try again to fix my font's problem areas. Since I had no lowercase, I used the copy-and-paste technique to turn the original caps into a set of small caps, and I increased the height of the new uppercase glyphs accordingly. Of course, now the ugliness of the N became even more pronounced, so I aborted the whole effort. Besides, I've noticed that when the height grows beyond some undefined point, the whole font is rendered half as large as before in any given point size. For me, this font's beveled angles show best at the largest possible print size, 72 points.
Recently, a user commented that my font wouldn't work for him, since all he got was the letter F. It suddenly hit me that maybe he was seeing the F from FontStruct's logo, since it often represents missing glyphs, like the lowercase I hadn't produced. That was what motivated me to try one more set of revisions.
Incidentally, your jettletter font received the same type of comment, and when I saw that this user also got nothing but F, I realized that your font's lack of an uppercase might be behind that problem, too. You can see my response on your font's home page.
You're correct about the scale of my font. The grid height is 95, and the width is 57. (More about that later.) This makes stretching or compressing glyphs somewhat complicated, since it's impossible to see an entire glyph on the screen. And if you wish to use keyboard shortcuts, then you can't employ the full-view option, which makes things even more difficult. The only solution is to highlight and move parts of each glyph until you've finally assembled it in its new position. During this process, you have to move the grid with the hand tool over and over. Then, you must fill in any gaps that were created by the move.
I'm well aware that my monospacing fetish limits what I can do with various characters, but once I've committed to a fixed-width format, I'm totally obsessive. It doesn't mean that I won't change a font's dimensions when necessary, because I always seem to use the trial-and-error method for determining glyph size. In this case, I figured out that for all the lines inside the glyphs to meet properly, I had to use an odd-numbered width, and I kind of stumbled upon 19 blocks for each vertical and horizontal stroke. The 57-block width came from 19 X 3, while the 95-block height is 19 X 5. I liked the proportions this achieved, and from there I just had to make the glyphs fit. The hardest thing was deciding which set of diagonals would work best for each glyph, and you can bet I made many false starts until I was sufficiently pleased with my results. I know that M and W may not be ideal at any height, but that's how it goes with my monospacing technique.
I believe I've addressed all your comments, probably in far greater detail than you wanted. Most of all, you should know that I'm so grateful to you and many others for the words of encouragement, and for the constructive criticism as well. Thanks!
I'm using FireFox on Windows, but I imagine this should work with other browsers and operating systems.
@fontcollector: I very much appreciate the detailed response! I can well understand the difficulty of trying to briefly (or otherwise) communicate the challenges and successes of the fontstructing process. New things are sometimes easy to see and often very hard to describe. Mammoth accomplishments, like this fontstruction, conceal within their polished details untold hours of manual bricksetting (haha, new word) and myriad false starts and branching paths. You inspire me with you clarity, humility, and sanity in regards to these thing.
Also, let me apologize for being somewhat of a broken record; I wasn’t the first to request variable widths for these glyphs in addition to other changes and variations. I am glad that I returned to the subject, though, as you generously imparted more of your experience creating this. The post-fontmortar-update info is especially tasty. I didn’t realize/remember that the brick limit for saving fontstructions has been upped.
An odd number of bricks for stroke width...hmm, that makes sense, I suppose, considering the central inline itself is one brick thick. Since every continuous black or white outline of the same thickness will add two more bricks to this (one on each side of the original), we get a 2n+1 stroke thickness counted in bricks, where n is equal to the number of consecutive outlines.
I am quite positive guessing that you neither built these glyphs from the inside out, nor the outside in. So fascinating that the ‘rules’ behind this design are quite simple, but the process of translating the rules to the fontstructor’s grid is quite difficult. From your dafont.com stats, it seems that tens of thousands of folks have appreciated this stunning design by downloading it. Really, though, it takes dedicated and experienced fsers to appreciate the sweat and tears you put into it.
Cheers!
As for the number of bricks per stroke, I was surprised to realize that it didn't matter whether the central line of each character was black or white. Either way, an odd number of bricks was necessary to close all the borders, so to speak.
I actually did build these glyphs from the outside in. Yet I freely confess that the beveled illusion was a happy accident that simply appeared as I constructed the diagonal corners. (Obviously, the font's name popped into my head afterwards.) And the shapes within shapes within shapes were not part of my original vision. That aspect began to develop almost before I noticed what was happening!
I really appreciate your sub-pixel renderings; however, I prefer the largest possible point size when I use this font to make greeting cards for friends and family.
By the way, though I've used your brilliant brickstacking technique a few times, I'm sure you're aware that this font didn't need it. But I still wonder how you managed to discover that method in the first place! You're truly amazing!
As for the number of bricks per stroke, I was surprised to realize that it didn't matter whether the central line of each character was black or white. Either way, an odd number of bricks was necessary to close all the borders, so to speak.
I actually did build these glyphs from the outside in. Yet I freely confess that the beveled illusion was a happy accident that simply appeared as I constructed the diagonal corners. (Obviously, the font's name popped into my head afterwards.) And the shapes within shapes within shapes were not part of my original vision. That aspect began to develop almost before I noticed what was happening!
I really appreciate your sub-pixel renderings; however, I prefer the largest possible point size when I use this font to make greeting cards for friends and family.
By the way, though I've used your brilliant brickstacking technique a few times, I'm sure you're aware that this font didn't need it. But I still wonder how you managed to discover that method in the first place! You're truly amazing!
So you did build these characters from the inside out? I thought you might have built a few glyphs that way. Once you constructed the essential corner and intersection details, though, I thought for sure you would make maximum use of the copy/paste to build out the character set.
Visualizing the negative space surrounding the final outline with just the innermost inline to go on would be quite a challenge! Also, each “outline” is not necessarily a direct result of the prior one. Sometimes they introduce new details in order to form the character’s final silhouette. How much trial and error did this involve?
It’s probably an impossible question to answer. I know from my own experience how errors and challenges and solutions that don’t quite fit can all lead to the very innovations that go on to define a work. The final result may not look a lot like the initial sketch, the path to it may not be linear or sequential, and the inspiration may arrive before it was consciously sought!
In the finished fontstruction, many of these complex and perfectly resolved corners and intersections are repeated as if they were modules themselves. I imagine this way of breaking down (or building up) complex schemes into (or from) fewer elements is a big motivation to fontstructors who keep requesting a brick grouping function or the ability to define custom bricks.
Thanks for appreciating the blown-up sub-pixel samples. I like to see how fontstructions perform at various sizes and was a bit surprised to see how well this giant scales down. The proportions of each character turn out to be solid set both large and small.
But that quantized rainbow artifact in the AA was delightfully unexpected and exactly the sort of random awesomeness that inspires me to keep searching it out.
I said that the glyphs were built from the outside in, but that's not entirely accurate. Most of the A began with just the outline. I added some vertical and horizontal stripes, until I reached the top-left corner, where the diagonals started taking shape. That's when I first saw the beveled illusion. At this point, I went back to the bottom-left and realized that the connecting horizontal lines should become shorter as they moved up the leg, thus creating a maze-like pattern of concentric shapes. Once that feature was established, it became a little easier to complete the first glyph, although the work was quite slow and tedious due to the large size of the grid.
Of course you're correct that subsequent characters were made using as much copy-and-paste as possible. The first diagonals that weren't pitched at 45 degrees took a lot of time and more patience than I usually possess. But as I proceeded, I was able to replicate more parts of each new glyph.
And you're also right that some glyphs don't appear to have been built in a simply concentric fashion. There were many false starts until I figured out how to deal with intersections that were merely 90-degree turns. But some of the most challenging issues were the angled connections of K, M, N, Q, R, V, and W, for example. Smoothing out the middle of both X and 8 offered other problems that I had not anticipated. And 5, 6, and 9 required constant reworking where the central diagonal meets a vertical section.
But the most difficult glyph of all was the *. Risking triteness, I have to say that the aggravation paid off, because it's my favorite character by far!
One thing that baffles me is that many FSers release fonts they've never downloaded. I'm not talking about fonts that were impossibly large. I guess I'm too obsessive, especially with monospacing, but I had to test this font many times before I was comfortable enough to share it.
You said, "The final result may not look a lot like the initial sketch...." Perhaps you've arrived at the heart of my FontStructing difficulties. I'm not an artist, and I've never made a preliminary drawing of any glyph before diving into the dangerous waters of the FontStructor! :>)
{ } _ ^ ~ `
And six glyphs were tweaked:
( ) [ ] | $
If you'd like to download the new version of Bevel'sAdvocateMono, I apologize for the inconvenience.
I'm humbled by praise from such supremely talented FontStructors as you, thalamic, and many others!
Cheers!
Incidentally, I've been preparing a new version of this font that is not monospaced. This was suggested originally by djnippa and more recently by Will. I hope you'll like it!
And NovaMono has been downloaded more than 11,000 times at dafont.
I always appreciate your generous comments, Ray!
what's amazing is every size have is own personnality and appearance, that is very interessting
I love IT
Incidentally, I've been watching your development as a FontStruct designer, and I should have sent my compliments to you before now.
btw Félicitions! for busting the 50000 DL on dafont :)
Thanks again!
Today, a representative of the museum responded that they're closed for the summer holiday. In the meantime, she's forwarding my request to the correct department. If anything happens, I'll let you know. Cheers! :)
Great one :D Some of the glyphs reminds me of stargaze ^^
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