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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
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.
Im speachless. Powerful. No idea. Wow. 10/10.
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. ;)
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. ;)
Well that's an easy 10/10.
@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.
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. ;)
Thank you BanjoZebra & Geneus1 for setting me on the right track. :)
totally awesome
@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! :)
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