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.

Inspired by the RoboCop movie logos -- Outline Version. Now includes full character set. For Solid Version, see the "Alex Murphy Solid" font; for dingbats of OCP logos, see the "Alex Murphy Dings" font. Type "RoboCop" into the View-User Input option to try it out!

July 31, 2021 update: Font at version 2.0.  Diagonals and lowercase crossbars were thickened, and diagonals now cross into the vertical strokes. Now more movie accurate than ever!