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filters: 2x2
x-height: 2.5 bricks
cap height: 3.5 bricks
# of unique composites: 220+

The ultra-low resolution of this grid may be difficult to grasp without cloning. Fontstruct’s logo has a nominal x-height of 3 bricks, by comparison.

The level of detail, control, and finesse possible in a given fonstruction depended mostly on resolution prior to the recent advent of stackable composites. Did you want it better? Make it bigger!

Brute force, now meet Elegance.

Instead of building individual glyphs hundreds of bricks tall, stackable composites allow us to design rich modular schemata hundreds of bricks deep. Using curved bricks at their largest scale, linear and curvilinear elements dynamically harmonize and oppose. As well, screen fonts can be effectively hinted (aside from notable lack of kerning controls) without sacrificing the integrity of joins and intersections. And the trapping possibilities, Oh the sweet sweet trapping possibilities...

Please, vote kindly and stay tuned for more :)

37 Comments

This is the original lc design. I since added trapping and adjustments to marry them with the later majuscules. Characters greatly changed may return later as alternates (r, I’m looking at you :)

Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 25th january 2011
Awesome modern twist to blackletter! Love the s@@
Comment by 3moDuDe 25th january 2011
This is great! I'll be watching for the UC ;P
Comment by Ken Bruce (crispycraker) 25th january 2011
Well done! The solution for the 's' fits really good and the bottom of the 'j' just looks awesome. This font is worth to have a closer look at all the letters, one can learn very much. I’ll be watching for the UC and further characters… great!
Comment by Tylo 25th january 2011
Great font! And great use of the macarony bricks. My favourite glyphs include: c, d, g, q, r, s, x. And I like the little subtleties; the slight curves where the bowl connects to the stem.
Comment by Christian Munk (CMunk) 26th january 2011
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 2nd february 2011
Thank you all for the warm comments, so far! I hope you enjoy the uppercase and that I didn’t keep you waiting too long. :^)

At first, I first wanted to respond with a lament about how convincing capitals are just not possible within fontstruct at this scale. Ever the big dreamer and innovator, even I did not consider it likely. Yet, aside from a conspicuous absence of overshoots, the flexibility of fontstruct proved greater still.
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 2nd february 2011
Wooonderful work! Thanks again, master. Great is the day when a person learns something new.
Comment by elmoyenique 3rd february 2011
You
Im speachless. Powerful. No idea. Wow. 10/10.
Comment by Drgrit 3rd february 2011
Many thanks, dear friends and fellow typophiles. Cloning enabled. It’s a little messy in there, but I couldn’t resist. :) Elmo, your words are so true, and I am learning again how to share.
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 3rd february 2011
Since your hallucinating "Djangogh", which is for me one of the best fonts of all times, modular or not, you developped a strong signature, immediately recognizable, even if your works explore different syles. It's "un je ne sais quoi", of elegance, a perfume of what i'd dare say "beauty", even if this word is so subjective, a natural sense of equilibrium and flow with many irregular, and often incredibly complex elements, a measured "folie douce", never shocking but always innovative. Thanks for authorizing cloning, maybe i will try to do a "very" personal derivation, if i can, what is not sure at all. By the way, for me the caps are 7 cases high and Lc 5, when you work in 2x2 you can also use the intermediary cases, that's one of my prefered tricks to create strange shapes by interlocking layers, and that was a very good alternative at the time we had not yet stacking and composite possibilities. So in my opinion all cases count. :0)
Comment by Abneurone Fluid Types 3rd february 2011
Congratulations! FontStruct Staff have deemed your FontStruction worthy of special mention. “fs Kronos” is now a Top Pick.
Comment by Rob Meek (meek) 3rd february 2011
Incredible work... I could tell at first glance that this font has come out of your garden. Your imagination of what can be achieved with composites and filters and other wizardry is still unequalled, and thank god it is also coupled with this imperturbable sense for pure style. Chapeau!

I just wish I would find the time to fontstruct again... My last release dates from half a year ago. Fonts like this one are bitter-sweet reminders of how much catching up I'll have to do. ;)
Comment by Tobias Sommer (shasta) 6th february 2011
Oh, and that g might just make it to my Top 10 of the coolest characters ever to come out of the grid.
Comment by Tobias Sommer (shasta) 6th february 2011
I have continued to tweak this fontstruction live (most of the 58 downloads resulted from working out and testing 44 characters), so the best way to get a sense of the changes is to compare the two samples.

The trapping scheme had to be worked out across the lowercase, leaving only z unchanged. The very imperfect, faceted nature of the uppercase invited me to keep adjusting the contrast, stroke weight, and trapping for 17 of them (A B C D G H J K L O P Q S T U W Z) going for cohesion and evenness of color if a no less imperfect upshot.

A clone at this time will reveal how some of the more recherché composites arose most recently (and hence occur at the end of the unorganized my bricks palette). @meek: Thank you as always for the top pick and especially for enabling official stacking of composites! I wish the fontstructor had a navigation function that worked like a reverse eyedropper tool on the brick palette allowing us to click through instances of a given brick while holding a hot key. :)

The brick count for fs Kronos is now 250, though some, inevitably, are simply rotations of other bricks I couldn’t be bothered to track down in an ever burgeoning brick palette. Without taking a purely decorative or grunge approach, I can’t imagine pushing the bricks much further in terms of sheer diversity and raw number of composite solutions. In a common bit of dramatic irony, all the subtle optical variations entailed by these 250 bricks are my attempt to make what is essentially a modular creation (read: repeating elements) a more consistent design! I wonder what Em42 thinks of this, but I think I know. ;)
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 7th february 2011
@shasta: It means a lot to me that you stopped in to reflect and cheer on my work. Very heartening words from an fs veteran and friend who has shared the journey here from the start. I will pray for the time and inspiration for you to make more of the amazing and attractive works I remember you by and that the world always meets you in the sharing of generosity of good will.
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 7th february 2011
@3mo, @tylo, @CMunk: Just wanted to thank again everyone who first responded. I wonder what you guys think of the capitals and new lowercase. Did I take it too far and lose some of the original’s charming sturdiness?
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 7th february 2011
Phenomenal work. After cloning it, I see the odd and mysterious composites you have there. And then I look back and see the Top Pick stamp. And then I decide to add it to my favorites. Why? Cause it's great.
Comment by BanjoZebra 8th february 2011
I still don't love the x. Any way you could fix it?

Well that's an easy 10/10.
Comment by BanjoZebra 8th february 2011
It was actually a New Year's resolution for me to catch up on comments and messages. So much for that. But with the stellar creative working coming out of FSers recently its hard not to say anything. This work in particular gives me a sense of a finely sculpted art piece rather than a fontstruction. The results are even more amazing after checking the inner brick mechanics. And although I'm not a big fan of the x, it is totally consistent with the style you're designing. Great work. So this isn't the first time I've been in jaw-dropping bewilderment from your work. I was even expecting you to discover a way of stacking composites before meek released the update, so quite frankly, I'm a little disappointed, Will. ;-)
Comment by geneus1 21st february 2011
I really admire what you've done here, but there's one character I really feel like is taking away from this typeface: the capital W. I think it would look a lot better if the inner peak was brought down (maybe to the x height?)
Comment by wmscottsimpsonjr 24th february 2011
Hi guys! Thanks your for your patience waiting for me to get back to you. I have been going through a bit of a rough time – don’t worry, everything is well enough with me right this moment — I just need to take my time, these days, to get there. Please understand I mean you no disrespect. :)

@geneus1:
I truly appreciate your praise and input. No doubt in my mind you are the master chef of fontstructing, so your appreciation and sense of wonder at my techniques always means a great deal to me.

And, haha, you know me well! Let me reveal to you a little embarrassing truth. All this time exotic stacks have been quite possible in the fontstructor – I have the modest proof of an unreleased fontstruction made in October containing a single intentionally glitched composite stack – but, I must also admit I couldn’t find a consistent method in my admittedly brief [this time] search. The brute force method would cripple any fontstructing process that made use of it, and hardly enable the extensive use of composite stacking in fontstructions such as fs Kronos.

Creating the one glitched composite stack was enough proof for me, I guess, that they would eventually find official support. ;)

Good thing. Per-brick Boolean AND has proven again and again to be quite an effective tool for this kind of modular design. The degree of effectiveness may not have seemed so obvious at the time I first championed for official support, which was before I had set to work tracking down the original brickstacking glitch (but not before I remembered I had already seen my first [annoyingly so] unintentional stack).

The importance of AND; this was one of the first things that dawned on me while using the fontstructor, so it was somewhat of a magical mistake that I stumbled into it, tucked it away as an annoyance, and then returned to it with the realization that I could turn it into a gift for you all. This awareness and secret joy of mine was all well before even the 22.5/67.5° bricks were added – which I bet are likely the most often used candidates for legacy stacks.

You can see that this whole group is possible by stacking just the first sixteen bricks of the collection in a set number of ways. I judged it as inelegant at the time to add so many bricks when, clear enough to me, Boolean AND just had to be added, yet they now prove uniquely useful in the current composite scheme as stacks and composites cannot yet be iterated in further composites. This uniquely differentiates the 22.5° bricks from the 45° bricks, as they currently possess a higher resolution in both x- and y-axis in all compositing modes. We need Rob Meek to add a set of 45° bricks that extend the last eight he gave us, bringing them in line with the ruleset that generated the 22.5° bricks. Or we need him to program/enable one of the truly powerful features on the horizon: iterative compositing.

Surely this has all been on the roadmap in some form, AND meek’s understandably not too hip on making promises to us he may not be able to keep nor sharing his plans too far in advance of their release. At least with me. ;) I wish he would let us know, though!

I am convinced you, Gene, amongst perhaps a very select few – due mainly to the conceptual complexity but also the learning curve involved in grasping and wielding such a toolset – will make masterful and mind-blowing use of this feature. You already made this stunningly clear with your legacy of constant genius in pushing the creative boundaries, and again with your unmatched set of 2.0 ’structions exploring grids both big and small. There are so many ingeneus details that sing in your work with a subtlety you may think no one picks up on and savors. Just don’t take my silence, sometimes, the wrong way. So often I see what you did there, and I am always amazed and inspired! A truly original gridbuster!

I can’t even imagine what you have made and not shared with us. Your stable of 1000+ fontstructions – geneus1’s stash bag, or treasure trove as meek called it – is a monument in itself.
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 25th february 2011
@wmscottsimpsonjr:
Thank you for the valuable critique. You have already helped me find a better solution. Please, let me know what you think.

I was pretty happy with the ugly-duckling roughness of the W, but the negative spaces were left completely out of balance in my original solution. I did not drop the apex, but I have rebalanced and nudged all the strokes just so, going fully for mechanical stroke contrast instead of the interesting faceted approach of the original (change also reflected in the capital M).

These little gems of creative critique are always the best feedback. I invite anyone to please consider sharing your critiques, even if you can’t yet see a way to improve my mistakes. :)

Oh, and on that note, I will also be getting around to adding a more conventional roman x. ;)
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 25th february 2011
I am finally working on the numerals! Their widths are pretty uneven, and I will seek to fix this, yet I like them on their own merits. Enough to keep them together for a time! :) Some alternates in the More Latin range are also under consideration.
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 25th february 2011
By popular demand a new x. Sample updated.

Thank you BanjoZebra & Geneus1 for setting me on the right track. :)
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 25th february 2011
Ohhhh yeah smexy new x :D
Comment by 3moDuDe 25th february 2011
I thought the original x was fine, but the new x is very nice. Nice improvement.
Comment by aphoria 25th february 2011
What's that little dimple on the K?
Comment by BanjoZebra 1st march 2011
a bit looks like Jewish script,

totally awesome
Comment by Adien Gunarta (Adien Gunarta) 1st march 2011
@3moDuDe, aphoria: Thanks for welcoming the new x to the party. I continue to be so smitten with my original offering, I will keep it as an alternate.

@Adien Gunarta: Thanks :) And for the keen observation! The incline of my simulated square-nibbed pen strokes hybridizes a 60° incline with the 30° incline characteristic of most latin scripts, forming at ~60° the asymmetrical serifs and most all of the crowning horizontal strokes and shoulders of the capitals. Especially the later quality gives the sturdy ”square” look of Jewish, or Aramaic, script. The new x bears more than a passing resemblance to א (aleph).

My hybrid approach can be extrapolated directly from the macaroni bricks, which can only be rendered when using a square-nibbed pen by smoothly rotating the angle of incline to form two concentric curves. This unique, modular ductus informs all the little choices I made designing fs Kronos, including when to break away from the rules, as with D.

@BZ: The dimples you see on both K and k, and, to a lesser extent, y, are vibrant little imperfections stemming from the brick limitation of the official palette I describe above in detailed response to geneus1. If you look closely at them in the fontstructor, you may see how I am approximating with several bricks a very simple shape I cannot currently make at this scale.

I mentioned above how the 45° bricks need to come in line with the 22.5° bricks, but didn’t include an image depicting these missing bricks. Soon, I will remedy this by posting images here as part of my official request to meek. Good eye, btw! :)
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 2nd march 2011
This is absolutely gorgeous. What more can be said?
Comment by intaglio 12th march 2011
How is this possible? How did you make these amazing composites? I cannot do that!
Comment by Agent Demonic Ladybug 12th march 2011
Congratulations! FontStruct Staff have deemed your FontStruction worthy of special mention. “fs Kronos” is now a current Featured FontStruction.
Comment by Rob Meek (meek) 14th march 2011
Thank you, Rob, for this unprecedented honor.
Comment by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ) 14th march 2011
The / & \ are WAY too big but other wise good 9.9/10
Comment by mat1956 25th april 2011
Congratulations! FontStruct Staff have deemed your FontStruction worthy of special mention. “fs Kronos” is now a current Featured FontStruction.
Comment by Rob Meek (meek) 10th october 2011
Excuse me while I sit in the corner and recover from taking a look at a clone...
Comment by Houlaiziaa 28th april 2013

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