This, of course, raises the question: what is a script? It’s a fair query. Some define the classification much more broadly than others. Scripts are most commonly and fundamentally derived from writing, but that leaves a lot of room for variation and interpretation. A formal copperplate script is as worthy of the title as the freehand bounce of a sign painter’s brush.

Must the letters be connected? Not all handwriting is cursive, after all. Some folks lift their pen off the paper from time to time, or even between every letter, as in the case of “print” writing.

These professional typefaces from FontShop offer an idea of the variety of lettershapes and stroke connections that scripts can embody. From top to bottom: Tangier, FIG Script, Bickham Script, Cottingley, Handsome, Bery Script, BistroScript.

In the end, scripts always reach back to a common ancestory: handwriting. But must it look like it was made by hand? A typeface can be as geometric and constructed as FIG and rightfully be called a script. And we’ve already challenged you to explore the “handmade”. So, for this competition, the core requirement will be a connected script.

Design your FontStructions so letters connect in the most natural and/or innovative way. Keep in mind that connections don’t always need to be at the baseline, or share a common height, throughout the glyph set. And if a letter just doesn’t feel right with a connection, omit the link. (BistroScript, for example, flows naturally, even though it’s ‘s’ doesn’t meet neighbors to the right.) With this guideline in mind, you’re allowed up to 5 linkless lowercase glyphs. Your uppercase, numbers, and punctuation don’t need to connect — but they may catch the jury’s eye if they do!

Other than that, the brief is fairly open. For this competition, as long as your lowercase glyphs are independently distinguishable and connect to each other, it’s a script! Of course, the judges will be looking for original and well-executed entries overall, but they will focus on the most graceful or inventive connections. It’s all about the flow.

While it’s the most underrepresented category on FontStruct, there are several notable scripts in the Gallery. Here are some fine examples of what can be done. Top to bottom: High Voltage (shasta, featured in PCWorld), Bromance (em42), fs grayletter (thalamic), Dry Heat (CMunk, a set of three fonts for connection options).

Competition Time Period

May 23 – June 14, 2013

Competition Rules

1. You must be a registered FontStruct user.
2. Your submission must have a connecting lowercase, with up to 5 exempt (unlinked) glyphs.
3. Your submission(s) must be posted and made “public” between May 23 – June 14 2013. Although you are encouraged to share your submission(s) at any time between these dates, your FontStruction submission(s) must be public (marked “share with everyone”) no later then June 14 at 11pm PST. Additionally, your submission(s) must remain public until June 30 in order to give the judges enough time to review all qualifying entries.
4. Your submission(s) must be tagged with a “Scriptcomp” tag. (For fairness, during the competition time period, no FontStruction with the “Scriptcomp” tag will be awarded a Top Pick or be available for a Featured FontStruction pick.)
5. Your submission(s) must be downloadable. If your FontStruction cannot be downloaded, the submission will be disqualified.
6. Your submission must be a newly published FontStruction. Simply adding the “Scriptcomp” tag to an already published font is not allowed.
7. For each submission, you must post at least one sample image in the comments of the FontStruction.
8. No letters in each submission can be MORE THAN 48 bricks high.
9. FontStruct cloning is permitted but the judges will be looking for original work.
10. You may enter up to three FontStructions to the competition.
11. This is a friendly competition. Cheering, favoriting and fun banter is encouraged but cruel and uncivil behavior will not be tolerated.
12. No rules regarding licensing. You may choose any Creative Commons license you like for your FontStruction.

Tips

• The new Kites, Shards, and Fins bricks may come in handy for this genre.
• Connecting strokes can be part of each glyph, or they can be a separate character (such as the space) that elegantly binds letters together.
• Connecting strokes can be on either side of the glyph — or both!

Judging and announcing the winners

All qualifying FontStructions will by judged by the FontStruct staff and guest judges, June 15–30. Three prizewinners will be chosen. One of these will be the FontStructors’ Favorite. Winners will be announced in a FontStruct Blog post on July 2.

Prizes

Each winner will receive their choice of

• a signed and numbered copy of the FontStruct poster
• a signed copy of the book The Geometry of Type

In addition, all winners will have their winning FontStructions posted as Featured FontStructions for two weeks after the winners are announced.

FontStructors’ Favorite

The valid entry with the greatest number of legitimate favorites at 11pm PST on June 14 will be one of the three prizewinners.

Spread the Word

Tell your friends. The button floating above every FontStruction is a really quick and easy way to point your friends and followers to your work. Maybe you can drum up some more   s for your entry in that way, or entice some novice FontStructors into the game.

Questions?

If you have questions just add them as comments to this post.

Let’s get FontStructing!

Since then we’ve had almost 800,000 confirmed registrations and more then 650,000 FontStructions have been created.

Every day, designers use FontStruct to create new work, or as a resource for finding grid-based, modular fonts. FontStructions are in widespread use in projects all over the world. We’re also especially happy to have seen FontStruct emerge as a widely-used tool in typographic education.

Over the past five years, cautiously but steadily, new features have been added to FontStruct and we intend to continue with this development in the five years to come.  To celebrate our birthday looking forward, we wanted to launch a new feature today.

Grid Scaling

For the first time you can now adjust the proportions of the FontStruct grid itself by scaling it horizontally and/or vertically. Make sure you are in “Expert Mode” then you will see the new controls in the “Filters” palette (Menu > View > Filters).

Grid scaling allows you to define your own brick proportions, opening up a myriad of new creative possibilities. The most obvious use for the feature would be as an aid in creating extended and condensed fonts, but I have no doubt the proven genius of the FontStruct hive-mind will come up with some wonderful and unforeseen applications.

Grid scaling is a feature which was discussed and planned before the initial FontStruct release but just never made it until today. I’m excited to see what FontStructors can do with it.

NOTE: Some people have already noted that the new feature also allows you to effectively increase the zoom level by a factor of 2. I hope that is useful to people with small and low-resolution screens, BUT the zoom was limited for a reason, so be careful with the scale of FontStructions. Working at high-resolution can get slow and frustrating, you are more likely to have technical problems – with saving for example – and you are likely to lose detail in your downloaded fonts.

Thanks

Thanks to all FontStructors past and present for filling the grid with your modular wonders over the last five years, and a special thanks as always to our generous sponsors FontShop.

Good night and happy FontStructing.

But are you done? Not if you want folks in Sweden to use your font. Or Denmark. Even Germany, France, or Spain will take a look at the fruit of your tireless labor and find it woefully incomplete. The countries of Eastern Europe are out of the question. Not to mention the rest of the world.

Above: On the left is my WPA Gothic, a FontStruction I was pretty proud of … until I saw what an uneducated slob it is! The font has about 200 glyphs but it’s still missing the characters necessary just to set a simple sentence in languages commonly used throughout the Western world. By contrast, the multilingual Modular Blackout Bold Condensed is capable of all these languages except the oft-neglected Vietnamese. (Language labels set in Renovare S2. Missing character boxes set in IconoMono.)

A 26-glyph, 52-glyph, or even 200-glyph FontStruction can be a useful exercise for prototyping and experimentation, but it is rarely considered a working font. So let’s look at what else your font needs to advance beyond a fun little piece of art to a truly useful tool.

Basic Latin

In the interest of simplicity this initial row in the editor is limited to only the bare minimum of letters and punctuation. Thus the title of the character group: “Basic Latin”. And while 100 or so glyphs seem like a lot — especially when you’re limping through the set of a particularly challenging design — this group of characters is really not enough to say more than a few things in English.

What’s missing? Accented characters (or diacriticals), of course. The bits that English-centric folk might consider superfluous appendages or “extra” characters are actually standard and necessary in other languages. In Spanish, the n and ñ are individual and distinct letters of the alphabet, each with an identity and pronunciation of their own. In French, a mouthful of sablé (cookie) is more desirable than a mouthful of sable (sand). In German, you can get by without an ß (eszett) by typing ‘ss’ but in most cases it’s linguistically incorrect. And none of this even touches non-Latin languages like Russian (which uses the Cyrillic writing system) and Greek.

So what makes a complete font? The answer isn’t so simple. In fact, an absolutely complete font probably doesn’t exist. Fonts that are bundled with operating systems have a massive arsenal of characters, covering most of the Western world, but even most of those don’t speak languages like Arabic, Hindi, or Chinese.

More Latin

But lets take a step back and assume you want your FontStruction to be usable in at least the most common languages that use the Latin script. Head on over to the character set menu and move beyond Basic Latin to More Latin. This set covers much of the Western world, from North and South America to Western Europe. Even Turkish is supported. Not counting the extra punctuation, fractions, and currency symbols at the end of the row, it’s 65 more glyphs to build. Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t despair — many of these characters are variations on letters you’ve already made. With a few exceptions, you can get by with a copying, pasting, and adding a diacritical mark. The “Copy to Latin Accents” command in Expert Mode expedites this process. If legibility and cultural sensitivity is important to you — and it should be! — take some time to learn how these marks are designed and placed. Microsoft’s Character Design Standards and the Diacritics Project are very helpful guides. Once you complete these characters your work is on par with the entry-level of most commercially available fonts.

Extended Latin A

If you want your font to get play in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe you’ll need to graduate to Extended Latin A. This range covers languages like Croatian, Czech, Finnish, Hungarian, Latvian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, and Slovak. Once you cap that last ‘z’ with a caron you will have completed a font with the same linguistic chops as the most premium commercial releases. Products with this extended language support are often stamped with a “Pro” label (see Adobe and FontFont’s definition) and are sought after by multinational corporations, publications, and any organization whose interests are global.

Punctuation

So you’ve got the letters necessary to speak all the languages you want to support. But you can’t string together meaningful sentences without punctuation. While there are myriad esoteric symbols for specialized fields like music, math, and science, let’s focus on the basic punctuation required for written texts in most Western languages. The obvious necessities are:

• period (.) comma (,) semicolon (;) colon (:) and ellipsis (…)
• question mark (?), and its inverted form, used in Spanish (¿)
• exclamation marks (!¡)
• straight quotes, single (') and double (") — though they really have no proper typographic function, computers have made them the default quote mark
• proper “curly” quotes, single (‘’) and double (“”)
• some languages, like French and Swiss German, quote with guillemets («» ‹›)
• …which are not to be confused with the lesser- and greater-than symbols (< >)
• dashes in their three most common lengths: hyphen (-), en (–), and em (—)
• underscore (_)
• currency symbols ($ ¢ € £)
• and other numerical punctuation, the percentage sign (%) degree (°) and number sign/octothorp (#)
• ordinal indicators are not commonly used in most languages, but (ªº) are expected in Latin-based languages like Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
• basic math symbols like plus (+) and equals (=) are necessary, while optional bits are the minus (−) division sign (÷) plus-minus (±) not equal to (≠) and multiplication sign (✕) — which is not the same as the letter ‘x’ as it should vertically align with numerals
• asterisk (*) bullet (•) and middle dot (·) a smaller, less conspicuous bullet
• at sign (@)
• ampersand (&)
• parentheses (()) brackets ([]) slashes (\/) and pipe (|)
• registered (®) copyright (©) and trademark (™) signs

What punctuation could be considered optional?

• curly brackets {} are not required for most uses, but they are indispensable for most programmers and can often come in handy when an alternative bracket is needed
• the section sign (§) pilcrow (¶) and daggers (†‡) are rarely used in modern typography, but can serve as decorative paragraph separators or footnote indicators
• single and double primes (ʹʺ) are used for units — like minutes and seconds, or feet and inches — and should have their own specific design, but most users end up employing the more accessible straight quotes
• currencies like the Japanese yen (¥) and Indian rupee (₨ or ₹) are less common in the West where the dollar, euro, and British pound reign, but they are important in their respective regions
• directional and decorative symbols like arrows (→) manicules (☞) checkmarks (✓) and stars (★) are not necessary for written text, but can certainly make a font more useful
• most users don’t expect a full set of numerator and denominator figures for making arbitrary fractions but these thirds (⅓⅔) and fourths (¼½¾) are often included

Are we there yet?

So what is a complete font? If FontStructing is simply a relaxing hobby, then the answer to that question is entirely up to you, the designer. But if you intend your font to live a life outside of the FontStructor, it is ultimately up to the user. And their definition of “complete” is based on a combination of their particular needs and expectations derived from other professional fonts. No matter how inventive or appealing the design of your alphabet may be, if your font is missing what your user needs, they will likely move on to a more well-equipped option.

We hope this introduction familiarizes you with the characters and symbols that are commonly neglected, so your hard work won’t be.

Stephen is a writer and typographer living in Oakland and Berlin. After six years at FontShop San Francisco as a creative director, he now publishes Fonts In Use, Typographica, andThe Mid-Century Modernist, and consults with various organizations on type selection.

Thanks FontShop

Happy new year everyone! Some great news to begin the new year is confirmation of the continuing sponsorshop of FontStruct by FontShop, the original independent font retailer. This means that server costs, and the ongoing support and development of new features on FontStruct are already guaranteed right through 2013.

FontShop launched FontStruct in 2008 and their generous funding of this free design service demonstrates their special relationship with the global community of designers and typographers. With over 600.000 genuine registrations and a similar number of FontStructions in the database (about 23.000 are publicly shared) FontStruct has established itself as a unique resource for modular, grid-based type. We’re particularly pleased to see it being used in schools, universities and art colleges around the world as an introductory teaching tool. FontStructions are also in common use in all kinds of design projects around the world.

Thanks to all FontStructors for sharing your creative energy, and helping to build the incredible typographic assemblage we see growing each day in our gallery. And thanks to FontShop, we can look forward to more wondrous creations in 2013.

Web Font bug fixed

Many FontStruct users have expressed a wish to try and use FontStructions as “web fonts” (typefaces used to display part of a specific website). The most convenient way to do this for FontStructions is to use a free online tool such as Font Squirrel to prepare the fonts in the appropriate formats. Unfortunately, until recently, this conversion process was not working.

Now, thanks to repeated prodding by FontStruct users and the kind help of the guys at Font Squirrel, we have identified and fixed a significant bug in the FontStruct font generator the “Font Mortar”. FontStructions should now work with the free-to-use “@font-face generator” from Font Squirrel to produce working web fonts. Their generator is an extremely well thought-out and useful tool which I would highly recommend.

Ideas for the next Competition?

The last competition was so incredible, I’d like to launch the next one soon. If you’d like to suggest a concept or theme for a FontStruct competition please let us know in the comments to this post.

Thanks and Happy FontStructing!

We activated 40 new bricks today. First up are eight gorgeous and gothic “Fin” bricks (above) as suggested by truth14ful. truth14ful also requested the four new “Kite” bricks …

… the 8 new “Shard” bricks …

… and 4 “Propeller” bricks.

Thanks for such a wonderful group of suggestions truth14ful! These are all simple and beautiful geometric shapes which logically complement the existing brick set. I don’t think any of them could be created with the current compositing or stacking options.

“House” Bricks

The so-called “house” bricks could be made as composite bricks, but it’s convenient not to have to do that. djnippa and others have been clamouring for house-shaped bricks for ages. Sorry its taken so long!

Extra Corners

Finally will.i.ૐ suggested these small corner bricks, and logic demands them!

All of the new bricks shown here were requested in the suggestions thread on the unofficial user forums. Thanks again to demonics for taking the initiative there.

Changing the brick palette (All Bricks and My Bricks)

Despite the growing number of bricks, we decided to keep the brick palette more or less as it is for now. It’s simple and does the job. But we have added a new option to resize the palette horizontally. This may help users who have a very large number of bricks in the ”My Bricks” window to get an overview.

Happy FontStructing!

The Stencil competition was a resounding success. We saw a record number of entries (70!), a great diversity and originality of approach, and overall an extremely high standard of FontStructing.

I was a bit unsure about the “Stencil” theme when we chose it for this competition. I thought people might find it hard to produce something fresh with so many great stencil designs on FontStruct already. How wrong I was to underestimate the creative energy of the FontStruct community. Well done everyone!

The Winners

Down to business. There was one standout winner which appeared in each judge’s top three, and was also chosen by the community as the “FontStructor’s Favorite”: “db Smoothie” by beate. db Smoothie is an unusual, but highly usable and technically-perfect stencil-FontStruction. Ray Larabie wrote:

db Smoothie bolsters the stencil cuts by lopping tops and bottoms strategically. But it does it in a way that accentuates the differences between letters. That’s something that a lot of other entries missed. You can minimize without making letters look uniform and overly modular.

In fact beate could have won several times over. Ray also enthused over “db Karton” (seen in the image at the head of this post):

db Karton avoids the usual stencil cliches and goes with a counter-less style. I love how the C & G avoid the commonplace “Pac Man” deco pastiche. The squared sharps allow a tight fit, which makes it really useful as a poster or headline font.

So well done beate!

The second winner is Thorin by Frodo7. Ray was smitten by its subtle qualities:

Thorin was my favorite entry. There are a lot of soft stencils around that would fit with a classic military theme, but Thorin has a plausible, contemporary military style. The optimal cuts and low-res polygonal flavor evoke an eerie digital camouflage voice.

Congratulations Frodo7!

The third winner is the brilliantly named and executed Crazy Fredericka by four, a fun, legible  and eminently usable form of insanity. High five four!

Winners will be contacted soon about their prizes.

If you entered and didn’t win, please don’t be sad. You were all amazing. And of course if you can’t wait for the next competition to win a poster,  you can still order it.

Special Mentions and Thanks

In the course of the competition we were delighted to welcome back funk_king and geneus1 to public FontStructing. Their spectacular returns for the Stencilcomp  are one more good reason to hold competitions more often.

We’ve also recently seen the welcome return of jmarquez and, assuming I haven’t been fooled by some nifty photoshopping, congratulations on the amazing knifework for the competition sample!

Finally thank you to will.i.ૐ for his truly incredible innovations most recently in this competition, his willingness to share and unsung, behind-the-scenes volunteer work on FontStruct.

The Judges

Protective hats off to our guest judge Ray Larabie, and honorary staff judge Stephen Coles who gave us a lot of their valuable time for free. As you can imagine it takes to long time to have a conscientous look at 70 FontStructions.

Ray Larabie is a Canadian font designer who has, for the past 15 years, created over 500 font families. He continues to create new fonts in his new home in Nagoya, Japan. More info about.me/raylarabie

Stephen Coles is an honorary FontStruct staff member, writer, typographer. Editor of Fonts In Use, Typographica, and The Mid-Century Modernist. He lives in Oakland & Berlin.

Rob Meek designs, develops and runs FontStruct.

And finally

Watch this space. We’ve got some new bricks coming soon.
In the meantime. Happy FontStructing!

It’s been quite a while since FontStructors have had the chance to battle for fun, honour and prizes in an official competition. Now, the wait is over.

The brief for this latest competition is to design a FontStruction for stenciling. All entries to this competition should be some form of stencil FontStruction published on or before October 12th 13th 2012 and tagged with “Stencilcomp“.

There’s quite a diverse collection of wonderful stencil designs in the FontStruct gallery already, both categorized and tagged, and FontShop also has a huge collection of stencils fonts to admire. But, perhaps a better place to look for original inspiration would be in your life and in the world around you. We hope you will be gripped by the pragmatic and purposeful spirit of the stenciling tradition.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with stenciling you can find lots of great resources online – introductions and tutorials, both basic and detailed. One important idea is that of islands and bridges. For a reusable stencil there can be no islands without bridges! Here are some examples including a Helvetica “O” with its isolated island, some stencil letters with bridges (in yellow), and an apocalyptic approach – no islands!

Every entry to this competition should be accompanied by an uploaded sample. You certainly don’t have to, but we would strongly recommend making and applying an actual stencil from your work.

Here are a few examples of great stencil designs from the FontStruct’s archive. Below that come the detailed competition rules which you should read before entering.

Competition time period

September 21st – October 12th 2012

Competition rules

1. You must be a registered FontStruct user.

2. Your submission(s) must be posted and made “public” between September 20th – October 12th 13th 2012. Although you are encouraged to share your submission(s) at any time between these dates, your FontStruction submission(s) must be public (marked “share with everyone”) no later then October 12th 13th at 11pm PST. Additionally, your submission(s) must remain public until October 26th in order to give the judges enough time to review all qualifying entries.

3. Your submission(s) must be tagged with a “StencilComp” tag. (For fairness, during the competition time period, September 21st to October 26th, no FontStruction with the “StencilComp” tag will be awarded a Top Pick or be available for a Featured FontStruction pick.)

4. Your submission(s) must be downloadable. If your FontStruction cannot be downloaded, the submission will be disqualified.

5. Your submission must be a newly published FontStruction. Simply adding the “StencilComp” tag to an already published font is not allowed.

6. For each submission, you must post at least one sample image in the comments of the FontStruction.

7. No letters in each submission can be MORE THAN 48 bricks high.

8. FontStruct cloning is permitted but the judges will be looking for original work.

9. You may enter up to three FontStructions to the competition.

10. This is a friendly competition. Cheering, favoriting and fun banter is encouraged but cruel and uncivil behavior will not be tolerated.

11. No rules regarding licensing. You may choose any Creative Commons license you like for your FontStruction.

Judging and announcing the winners

All qualifying FontStructions will by judged by the FontStruct staff and guest judges, between the October 13th 14th and October 20th. Three prizewinners will be chosen. One of these will be the FontStructors’ Favorite. Winners will be announced in a FontStruct Blog post on October 26th.

Prizes

All winners will receive a signed and numbered copy of the FontStruct poster.

In addition, all winners will have their winning FontStructions posted as Featured FontStructions for two weeks after the winners are announced.

FontStructors’ Favorite

The valid entry with the greatest number of legitimate favorites at 11pm PST on October 12th 13th will be one of the three prizewinners.

Spread the Word

Tell your friends. The button floating above every FontStruction is a really quick and easy way to point your friends and followers to your work. Maybe you can drum up some more   s for your entry in that way, or entice some novice FontStructors into the game.

Questions?

If you have questions just add them as comments to this post.

Let’s get FontStructing!

The FontStruct Poster was created by Lorenz Fidel Huchthausen aka Tylo, Christian Klier, and Rob Meek in Berlin in 2011. Lorenz and Christian are both students at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin. The poster features 129 distinctive modular glyphs from over 80 FontStructors laid out on the FontStruct grid. The emphasis is on celebrating the more, minimal, “classical” style of FontStructing, so no FontStructions which employ filters were included. A FontStruction – Exampla Sans Medium by Shasta – was used for setting the key and other additional text on the poster, and proved how wonderful FontStructions can look in print if tweaked appropriately (thank you optical kerning!).

A limited edition of 150 posters was printed in October 2011 on 250g matt, coated paper by Pinguin Druck in Berlin, using the offset technique.  The posters are hand-stamped and numbered on the reverse side. 100 will be sold.

At 63.5cm x 100cm the posters are a few mm over “double royal” size.

As mentioned above, if your work appears on the poster (see list below*) you can use the coupon code “ONTHEPOSTER” at Etsy to get a 50% discount (on one poster only!!!). If you’re not on the poster, the poster is still a bargain at 20€. We’re based in Germany so shipping is not cheap  (5.40€ for Germany, 11.10€ for the EU and €16.60 for anywhere else). We’ll throw a few FontStruct stickers into the tube to hopefully compensate a bit for that. Please use the contact button on the FontStruct Etsy shop page if you have any questions about purchasing, including shipping costs for multiple posters (we can probably put multiple posters in a single tube).

The poster is an inspirational tribute to the fascination of the FontStruct grid and will make a wonderful addition to any FontStructor’s studio wall. Get them while they’re hot!

*Here are the usernames of FontStructors whose work is on the poster (in alphabetical order):

alexfulton, 3moDuDe, afrojet, andythebest123, aphoria, atarbeev, b boy stylez, bauermc, beate, bokuwatensai, cam.ill, caseycastille, CMunk, cwillmor, dczyz, djnippa, dpommella, eaq, Electric Keet, elltee, elmoyenique, Em42, emepar7, ex5s3, Font, fontcollector, Frodo7, funk_king, garphynk, geneus1, Goatmeal, gspace, gudbjorg_bubba, gueldenstern, guentersen, happypill, Helgi, hisham4444, igorrossi, inkway, intaglio, jcanham, jmarquez, JoeAllison, jpfaraco, jrdbnsn, JustinOperable, kekeh, kix, krystman, l3eer12, LexKominek, loboarches, Magic Sam, minimum, mrclash, nathancox, naveenchandru, nemoorange, Neoqueto, p2pnut, Parry, Qimplef, raiu, raketentim,redkitten, rixag, rubendmarques, saberrider, sbrunoj, Schafgans, shasta, Sketchbook B, sliveress, Snuggles, SquarePeg, ssaamm, strawberrymilk, swing_mr, thalamic, theterrible, TobiasMik, Tylo, Upixel, vertigokid, will.i.ૐ, zhuk

Dear FontStructors,
We quietly launched a new version of the FontStructor editor last week. So what’s new?

Expert Mode

We thought long and hard about the best way to add new features to the FontStructor editor without cluttering up the interface. Experienced users wish to create complex and sophisticated designs with FontStruct, but the platform has also always been about simplicity, ease-of-use and a non-technical approach to type design. How can we keep the interface simple and intuitive, whilst supporting those who want to push the boundaries of grid-based, modular design even further?

The new “Expert Mode” button is our answer. It’s there not only to provide access to bells and whistles for “experts”, but also to make sure that we have a “Simple Mode” for those (“experts” or not) who like to keep things minimal. Some existing features such as brick-stacking and composites have gone into expert mode, along with the first new features for a while.

Unicode Support

In expert mode, by popular request, you can now create letters using standard unicode ranges. Select “Unicode Letter Sets” from the “Advanced” submenu to switch to unicode and you will see the dropdown change in the bottom right-left corner of the screen. Unicode support is not complete at the moment but there are 19648 unicode code points available using “Unicode Letter Slots”. In the standard character sets, 2793 codepoints are covered.

If you don’t know, or care what unicode is, don’t feel sad or bad. In a simple, pragmatic sense it just means you can design a more diverse range of characters. You can still have just as much fun constructing letters in FontStruct in blissful ignorance of unicode.

Extra, extra guides

In expert mode, you now have access to an unlimited number of guidelines. Just rollover an existing guide to see the plus and minus buttons which allow you to add and remove guides. This feature has been requested many times and I’m very happy to be able to finally release it.

Guide-locking

Another new and useful feature in expert mode is guide-locking. Once you’ve arranged your guides you may like to “lock” them – this keeps them visible but fixes them in one place so they don’t react to your mouse cursor and they won’t get in the way of your FontStructing. There’s a menu command and keyboard shortcut (shift+J) available for this.

Note that guide-locking also locks the width control line.

Time-saving Commands

In expert mode, you now have access to a number of time-saving commands which automate repetitive tasks. There are commands to copy upper-case to lower-case and visa-versa, as well as a command to copy simple latin letters to their accented equivalents. You can read more about this feature as well as all the other changes on our updated help pages.

If you have any ideas for other time-saving commands, let us know.

Pen Type is now sticky

First of all, what used to be called “Mode” in the menu is now “Pen Type”. This is to avoid confusion with the new “Expert Mode“. The change in wording was a last minute thing (just now), so screenshots and help content may not reflect it for a while. More importantly, the “Simple” pen type, and the “Cycle” pen type are now “sticky”. This means if you choose either once, the system should remember that choice. So when you change away from the pen tool and back again, the pen should stay the same type. I know a lot of FontStructors don’t like the cycle pen so this should please them.

Anything Else?

Under the hood the FontStructor has been almost completely rewritten. Over the years, the inner-workings had become a bit spaghetti-like and this was making it extremely difficult to add new features. Now everything is clean, shiny and tangle-free we hope we can add features more efficiently in the future. The complete rewrite also means there is plenty of potential for new bugs to appear. So please let us know if you notice anything wierd.

Happy FontStructing!

(Screenshots show a clone of “Ohm Run Slab” by will.i.ૐ)

We’re very pleased that a number of FontStructions are featured in the latest edition of Slanted – #15 “Experimental”. Work from FontStruct intern Lorenz Fidel Huchthausen AKA “Tylo” was featured on the cover as well as inside.

Afrojet‘s “Brutal Exchange of a Smug for Some Faith” was also given its own spread:

Congratulations to those included.
If you want to submit work to future issues, check out the Slanted call for entries page ( in German and English).