While waiting at a doctor's office, absentmindedly drawing letters on my knee with a new pen in my hand, I realized after I while that I was doodling the glyphs of fs_penmanship, although with curved ends. Which got me thinking that it just might be possible with the new and improved HTML fontstructor.

This is the second version of that idea. The first version had too many compromises in lining up the stacked and nudged bricks. Be that as it may, the new fontstuctor has grown up so much and although quite recognizable compared to the original, but level 1000 in possibilities, all hidden behind a simple interface. Brilliant.

PS, Rob: I found two things that need further updating: 1. Because of the way 4×4 stacks work, nudges need to be in increments of 8th as opposed to the 4th that is currently the case, otherwise, some of the bricks just don't line up. 2. Bricks should be rotatable from the center of the grid box in increments of 15° (or at least 45°).

Apparently, it is quite easy to forget what gets a fontstruction going. Something about ultra condensed bla bla bla. The rest is just a matter of having a creative activity to occupy the mind. And if in the process you can help out a friend, all the better.

This is [was] a minimum [http://fontstruct.com/fontstructors/minimum/public] font, created December, last year. Unfortunately, minimum account has developed some problems that prevents normal usage such as editing descriptions, downloading fonts, commenting, etc. Nevermind. He was useless anyway. :-)

Also, I can't seem to figure out how to create links either. This must be my dumb year.

I saw the logo for tramplin.tv [pictured below] a loooong time ago and was fascinated by it. It used to live on my computer desktop so I can look at it frequently. Even thought to redo it in fontstruct but...just looking at it, it was clear it wasn't doable...at least back then. At some point, the image was moved off to some other to-be-filed folder, and eventually I forgot about it.

I found it again the other day while hunting for some other file.

It was still fascinating. And in the meantime, fontstruct had grown up considerably (Thanks, Rob!). It was time to attempt doing it.

Well, kicked my ass, didn't it.

It seems so simple: One diagonal that goes from one letter to another in smooth transition, bisected by a different angle diagonals. No. Easy in concept, killer in making the geometry work of 2×1 diagonals to 1×4 diagonals.

No matter what thickness of diagonals were selected and whatever the gaps were left, the angles would not line up at some point or another. Which was confusing as 2 goes into 4 exactly 2 times, so things should have lined up without complication. I remembered, many years ago kix used Transparent Windows utility to make the browser transparent so he could trace silhouetted figures for one of his brilliant fs. Even tried tracing. Nope. After many failed attempts, had to break out Illustrator to better visualize the grid and diagonal guides of my own.

[See picture below]

Figuring out the geometry was much simpler in Ai. Found out where I was going wrong. First attempt at doing a and m and making them line up worked like a charm. From then on, it was just a matter of doing the glyphs. Some of them were simple to execute; others like e and c and especially z were quite difficult...at least for my limited intelligence.

Anyway, here it is.

Disclaimer: The original logo is probably copyrighted to someone. I don't own the rights to it. It is displayed here for comparision purposes and for full disclosure. If the owners of the original logo have a objection for its display here, it will be removed immediately.

I was thinking of something else and the thought "go forth and multiply" came to mind.

The word forth brought to mind 4th, with the 4 fully formed as seen here. So it had to be done. In the process, I've made the personal best smoothest fake circle yet on fontstruct, backed by a pixel-by-pixel matching of a real approximated circle in Ai.