by Frodo7
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Yesterday afternoon I was sipping Coke on a sunny terrace and thinking about life, and the universe, when an idea came out of the blue about a new stencil font. The idea was so simple, I almost felt ashamed not having it much earlier. Back home I started to work on it, and created the first set of letters. It's a work in progress, fraught with imperfections, including the usual spacing-kerning problems. Remolino is a Spanish word for vortex.
50 Comments
@intaglio: Believe it or not, you were on my mind when I was working on some particular letters. I thought, you would shape it just the way I did (e.g. those little spikes at the end of the strokes, they were added later).
@funk_king: You've said it beautifully: the "fonts come to us". I was looking for this font for months, carrying around some sketches and samples with me all the time. They all suffered from being too complicated and polygonal. You are right about the songwriter and the melody. One could not put it more clearly.
@p2pnut: How interesting these shapes draw different pictures, metaphors in peoples minds. I thought at some point it looked like toothpaste squeezed out in three colours.
@djnippa: The Union Jack, interesting. I just wrote about the toothpaste tricolor. I might do some demo pic in red, blue and white. Special thanks for the critique. This is the sort of feedback, practical info I was looking for when I decided to publish this work half finished. I've modified the "r" accordingly, and it looks a lot better. The flat bottom "w": well, I've made a new version, but it looks inconsistent with the rest of the set. I'm not sure whether it was really what you suggested.
More seriously, the illusionary 3d effect reminds me some of your past scientifically crafted optical fonts. It seems that now you have the maturity not only to study and adapt to Fontstruct existing illusionary patterns, but to work on more personal designs integrating unconsciously, "naturally" in a much more subtle way effects derivated from your past studies. Great improvement in your own path.
Also, I find your aternate v absolutely cute and delicious.
You can clone it. It's a great honor to me that a pro designer sees potential in my work. I've changed the license, it remains open for cloning for a day. Other honest members are also welcome, if they're interested. I'm thrilled to see some new version(s) I would never imagined. And I can imagine a lot of things. I'm also aware of my own limits, and the huge potential of cross-pollination of ideas. I keep my works locked only to prevent copying and potential abuse by third parties. Sales for profit at some time in the future is not completely out of the picture.
I wish, I could have written something more fanciful, but this is how it happened. (How about this: Drinking good old ale with friends in The Green Dragon and smoking pipe-weed - longbottom leaf, of course.) But the exact location, the drink, and the scenery are not important. What is important, that after a tumultuous week I had a few minutes of perfect peace and happiness, and got the idea and inspiration for this font.
10/10
@djnippa: Eight different versions for a letter! Now I can see better your point. I really like the 1st,3rd, and 4th. I've made one identical with the 4th version, but I thought the bottom notch was too small to make any difference. Not anymore. Thank you for your help.
First, it is very important to have a good idea to start with. What sort of letters have in mind, what style, for what particular purpose. I usually start making sketches on square paper with pencil, and/or marker pen. I start with the most difficult letters to fit in the grid (e,s) or the ones with diagonal strokes.
The next stage is to build the font in Fontstructor using the selection of bricks. That's easy, since I already considered the possible bricks on the square paper. You can start working straightaway in Fontstructor omitting the first stage completely, but for me paper & pencil is still the most flexible medium for brainstorming.
Third stage: a series of refinements until I am happy with the result.
In this case with Remolino Stencil I've set the filters to 2:2 (select Advanced > View > Filters, set the values of both the Horizontal and Vertical Brick Size to 2.) This magnifies the bricks to equal four squares on the grid, and consequently gives you more freedom to place the bricks. You can see my selection of bricks on the picture. Very simple bricks, nothing special really.
You can also learn a lot by dissecting and reverse engineering some good fonts, in cases where cloning is permitted in the license. You can make your own modified version under the same license as an exercise to hone your skills. That's all.
What do you mean by "trying to find a language for myself"?
Training it's week? :-)
Hope you like it.
@Qaj: You are a rare mind around here (as folks making fonts in their spare time would not be queer enough). You invent scripts with ease, whole systems of writing with their "alphabets", and create some nice fonts for them. This is a whole new level of abstraction in typography, and don't expect much understanding from us literate almost exclusively in Latin script. We marvel at your works without much comprehension.
I ventured outside the realm of traditional scripts only once. See my Tengwar script Elrond .
P.S If you are wondering... Nenuial Meldraug is my Elvish name. I have a book by Ruth S. Noel called The Languages Of Tolkien's Middle Earth! I came up with the name.
I often observed, if I wanted to focus on something, there was always something else to interrupt, hinder or thwart my effort. The only reason I could manage to do anything at all was because a third thing interfered with the second one...
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