This is a work in progress, a project that started more than a year ago. Not every letters are ready, and the ones currently released, may change. I have all glyphs on paper, but my computer hardware capacity is very limited. Still, this early stage, an alphabet soup, could give a glimpse of the endless possibilities.
I haven't been around lately (and I do miss FS) and I was having trouble designing an op ad for the magazine I work for. So I decide to check out FS for ideas and look what I found just as I was logging in.
As Spicoli once said: Awesome! Totally awesome!
Virtuosic. Your LOTR-themed naming convention hits its stride here. ;)
The finished collection of alternates will indeed have unlimited application for logos and monograms as elegantly demonstrated by your Escher-esque æ.
I love the forced perspective illusion. Have you tried inverted-depth, popped-out alternate renderings for any of these glyphs? I mean something like this, except with the the glyph outline as the base layer instead of the solid rectangle used by Tylo.
So, you've resurrected the Ring of Power from Mount Doom and you're using its power to bend dimensions into fonts. Well played, Mr. Frodo. Strong and solid forms.
Might I inquire about this font's stats in reference to your hardware capacity? 1)How many grid spaces high? 2)How many brick shapes used? 3)Any filters?
Thank you very much your comments and votes. They are much appreciated.
Frankly, I was a bit tired of this impossible font. This is at least the third incarnation attempting the isometric projection look good enough. A previous version had same-width black and white stripes regardless of their angles (See the picture below. Note the cubes are slightly misaligned because the lack of true hexagonal geometry.) The present version is not perfect, but suitable to give the illusion of isometric perspective.
Glyphs with diagonal strokes raised the level of difficulty, and I'm not sure I found the best solutions for each of them.
@will.i.ૐ: I planned different flavors to make a small font family. Inverted depth was not on my list, but I'll think about it. I could only guess who would be more challenged: the designer or the reader.
@geneus1: This fontstruction is nothing special in terms of technical details. No filters, 69 bricks height, 13 different bricks including 4 custom made.
Most of the time I work on a Sony Vaio notebook (Y series), a tiny but quite capable machine blessed with a crisp 11.6" LCD. However, its screen real estate feels rather limited compared to the gorgeous iMac 27", I left at home, and can take advantage of only on holidays. Needless to say, to work on fonts larger than 50 bricks takes a lot of scrolling and other tricks, and a great deal of patience.
Thanks for the deets and for posting the image. It’s great to see your process. I offer these tips that I’ve used, many of which you probably know about, but may be of some benefit to others. For larger fontstructions, I’ve endeavored to find paths of efficiency in both minimal brick usage and workspace optimization. For your workspace, the browser you choose can affect the amount of on-screen real estate that you have. Google Chrome probably provides the most workspace. If you have IE or Firefox, it’s a good thing to shut off extra toolbars and turn on the Full Screen option, which is usually F11. If you’re already editing and don’t need keyboard shortcuts, then pressing F11 from the Fontstructor will give you the most space.
Although it doesn’t help much to tell you at this point, I would have started this fontstruction with 2x2 filters. This simultaneously cuts down on the amount of brick shapes and the amount of bricks used in each glyph, usually by a factor of four. This also reveals an additional benefit that is immediately recognizable on slower machines. By using only a quarter of the amount of bricks that you would use in 1x1 scale, the software performs faster while copying and pasting, scrolling, and moving from glyph to glyph because the extraneous bricks aren’t there to slow it down. But you would have to paint the bricks efficiently with minimal brick overlap. Working in 2x2 efficiently will also reduce the amount of data that is saved with the fontstruction, thereby speeding up its load and save times.
@geneus1: So many useful tips. Thank you. After a short period of time I uninstalled Google Chrome. Now I give it a second chance. F11 - full screen view - slowed down my machine noticeably, and the keyboard shortcuts didn't work. I wish the FONTSTRUCT title to be somewhere else in the FontStructor. The header takes up as much as 84 vertical pixels.
I've just discovered there was a free font named Strider already. I had to change the name. The next suitable name on my LOTR list was Rohan. A powerful name for this font family. Sorry for the inconvenience.
For the past 10 years or more I have used the 'Avant' browser. It is free, very stable, not resource hungry and very customisable. I am able to reduce all the title/address/buttons/tabs bars at the top to a total of about 1" (of my 19" monitor). using F11 (or F12) does not seem to slow things down - although keyboard shortcuts are affected, as with most (all?) browsers.
To work around the fullscreen keyboard shortcut problem, open a new blank tab in your browser, press F11 to make the browser full screen, then switch tabs to your Fontstruct tab...the keyboard shortcuts will work in fullscreen mode when done this way.
@meek: Thank you very much for the special mention.
@p2pnut: Avant browser - Low memory and CPU usage, no memory leak, real full screen mode, one-click Flash filter. Sounds very promising. I'll try it, and tell you how it worked for me.
@aphoria: Thank you for this very useful bit of information.
It seems you abandonned on your further variations the gorgeous mixing of different perspectives (so powerful on the numbers set here) you experimented in this initial version. I personally loved them.
I agree with neurone. The forced perspective illusions are solid platinum. Perhaps you could make a variation of the wireframe mode of Rohan NE 10 that reveals back faces and hidden edges?
@neurone error and will.i.ૐ: Have I abandoned the variations, different perspectives? Far from it. The other three perspectives are in the pipeline, I just need more time. At the beginning, I thought it was good to have all variations included in a single font. At that time only a selected few glyphs had four variants. Later I realized, it was better to sort them in separate fonts. Thus, I moved from the primordial mélange to the state of assortment. Check out my next piece, Rohan SW 01.
3D logotype. Work in progress.
36 Comments
Your designs never fail to delight and impress. 10/10 (even as a work in progress)
As Spicoli once said: Awesome! Totally awesome!
The finished collection of alternates will indeed have unlimited application for logos and monograms as elegantly demonstrated by your Escher-esque æ.
I love the forced perspective illusion. Have you tried inverted-depth, popped-out alternate renderings for any of these glyphs? I mean something like this, except with the the glyph outline as the base layer instead of the solid rectangle used by Tylo.
10/10
The upcoming UC would be greeeeeeeeeat!
Might I inquire about this font's stats in reference to your hardware capacity? 1)How many grid spaces high? 2)How many brick shapes used? 3)Any filters?
Frankly, I was a bit tired of this impossible font. This is at least the third incarnation attempting the isometric projection look good enough. A previous version had same-width black and white stripes regardless of their angles (See the picture below. Note the cubes are slightly misaligned because the lack of true hexagonal geometry.) The present version is not perfect, but suitable to give the illusion of isometric perspective.
Glyphs with diagonal strokes raised the level of difficulty, and I'm not sure I found the best solutions for each of them.
@will.i.ૐ: I planned different flavors to make a small font family. Inverted depth was not on my list, but I'll think about it. I could only guess who would be more challenged: the designer or the reader.
@geneus1: This fontstruction is nothing special in terms of technical details. No filters, 69 bricks height, 13 different bricks including 4 custom made.
Most of the time I work on a Sony Vaio notebook (Y series), a tiny but quite capable machine blessed with a crisp 11.6" LCD. However, its screen real estate feels rather limited compared to the gorgeous iMac 27", I left at home, and can take advantage of only on holidays. Needless to say, to work on fonts larger than 50 bricks takes a lot of scrolling and other tricks, and a great deal of patience.
The sample showing ae is terrific!
Although it doesn’t help much to tell you at this point, I would have started this fontstruction with 2x2 filters. This simultaneously cuts down on the amount of brick shapes and the amount of bricks used in each glyph, usually by a factor of four. This also reveals an additional benefit that is immediately recognizable on slower machines. By using only a quarter of the amount of bricks that you would use in 1x1 scale, the software performs faster while copying and pasting, scrolling, and moving from glyph to glyph because the extraneous bricks aren’t there to slow it down. But you would have to paint the bricks efficiently with minimal brick overlap. Working in 2x2 efficiently will also reduce the amount of data that is saved with the fontstruction, thereby speeding up its load and save times.
May 'Rohan' ride on to greater glory.
@p2pnut: Avant browser - Low memory and CPU usage, no memory leak, real full screen mode, one-click Flash filter. Sounds very promising. I'll try it, and tell you how it worked for me.
@aphoria: Thank you for this very useful bit of information.
Rohan NE 01
Rohan NE 04
Rohan NE 05
Rohan NE 10
Rohan SW 01
Found on Behance. Nice.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/Dope-Poster/15037795
Another one on Pinterest. It is more like the NE 04 version. Looks great.
2, 4, 6, and 7 arent facing the same direction as the other numbers
Looking at a font like this at a certain point can really create an optical illusion...
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