GEO-PROTESQUE - Geometric grotesque typeface
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This time I did an attempt at making a typical super rounded geometric gothic grotesque "workhorse" typeface. A sans serif style that is a very popular for headline and display text.
The idea for "Geo-Protesque" was to make a sans serif style that is strongly inspired by the pre- "International Typographic Style" -era. To dive deeper into a more decorative period of hand-lettering, pioneered mostly by architects and painters.
The most important difference as oposed to today's more traditional type design, is that during tose early days of the Modernism movement lettering usually was purpose made. Each letter had a unique role within a composition, making Lettering that was meant to be used in a unique configuration. These designs occasionally didn't even had full alphabets designed. And even more rarely getting manufactured and cast into full printing typefaces.
It was mainly inspired by those sans serifs seen in vintage sign paintings and show cards designs that often were more decorative artistic takes on the general basic stylistic concept of sans serif letters.
Although Geo-Protesque is essentially more of a contemporary looking design, I tried to incorporate some of that playfullness that came with these "free-form" sans serifs.
On the other hand this design sticks well within those realms where it remains faithful to simple geometric form. This created almost quirky looking letterwidth distribution in the upper set, and set somewhat of a funky rhythm. This gives the font a very strong early 1900's feel.
The lower case set has a much more uniform design that works well in a piece of body-copy text.
To pull this design off properly the font was created on a large grid using the 'faux'-Bézier approach. The rest just enfolded from there on out.
The design, (obviously) a very geometric grotesque, has some nice neo-grotesque features to it as well.
While many letters mostly have even stroke width, upclose you'll notice some stroke width variation is going on after all. This to bring more contrast into certain area's. Anther design feature is the font's generous and open letter-spacing.
The font is optimized for body copy in both digital and print use. Even at very small point sizes. In digital-display rendering it performs crisp even as low as 9pts. (Not bad I guess!)
Keep in mind that due to the nature in which 'faux'-Bézier curve fitting works this font might not be the best choice for a large size rendering. The linear interpolation method uses linear polynomials (straight lines) to construct glyph contours.
Beware that when using this font at very large point size rendering the remnants of this process will become visible!
Cheers
DER ZiiLTED - Neo-Grotesk italic hairline sans
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[ DESCRIPTION ]
The design is a simplistic slanted geometric hairline letterform with stylistic tapered spurs. Some extra glyph alternates were included to spice up this otherwise boring font, making it a little bit less boring.
The "DER ZIILTED" name was inspired by a poorly English speaking German person that is saying "The Tilted" in English but with a bad German emphasis on the phonetic sound of it hence 'der ziilted'
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[ INSIDE THIS FONT ]
■ Basic latin character set with only essential punctuation marks
■ Stylistic alternates
• Double storey lowercase 'a' & 'g'
• Spurless lowercase forms (still in trial stage and likely will change)
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[ TECHNICAL ]
■ Metrics(in square grid units)
• em-square: 11 × 4.5
• cap-height: 8
• x-height: 6
• ascent: 2
• descent: 3
• optical compensation: ☒
• stroke weight: 0.25
Nearly no kernig was done yet, but will be done at a later stage, since I'm 99.9% sure about having screwed up protocol for glyph 'side-bearings' in Italic fonts. (Still figuring out how exactly this should be handled properly, so stick with me on this matter..)
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[ PROCESS ]
Let's start with mentioning that only recently I was still tested 'Very Green' for Italic genetic material (found 0.01%).
I have very little experience doing Italic designs in general, having done only a hand full of trials, and completed only a couple. This is actually only the third 'true' Italic font that I have ever made with Fontstruct, and the second one (I think) that got published. Don't ask me why it took me about 5 years to finally do another, but, let me tell you this; Looking back at it after doing this font — "I now know why". This was tough to say the least.
I can imagine designing Italic fonts in general comes with it's own set of challenges of course. Doing this in Fontstruct only adds numerous challenges on top of that — "what else is new, right?!" Nothing that wasn't expected for the most part. But "holy frog on a leopard", what do I absolutely positively very much regret the choice to do so in such a small stroke weight. This stripped away every possible tollerance and free space for finetuning and making finalizing adjustments to minute little details required to perfecting everything (curvatures, transitions, slants and optical compensation).
I did the best I could to get visual aesthetics at least acceptable, and somewhat complete enough character set for basic latin text. There remain some small imperfections present for now that still need to get addressed.
For example I started experimenting with trying to achieve acceptable optical compensations such as overshoot. For now I only temporarily applied this to the experimental 'spurless' glyph alternate set for trial testing purpose, looking for acceptable results. And only once I found all the necessary solutions for each requisite glyph I transfer these adjustments one by one to the main character set. But all options remain open for the time being, it might so happen that in a later stage I decide not to implement them after all.
The 'spurless' glyph alternates will remain included to the project, but in what final form for now remains uncertain.
So from a typographer's point of view the font surely will look very basic and perhaps even simplistic. But looking at it from a Fontstructor's perspective, this was a lot more than just the average walk in the park for me.
But to be honest, I doubt I will do another Italic Fontstruction any time soon,haha
I hope you like it so far.
Cheers
STF_DERBY - Condensed Geometric Neo-Grotesk sans.
The idea was to make a typeface design that would suit small point size body style typography.
■ Multilingual support (94 languages)
■ Partial kerning WIP (8694 Pairs and counting)
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The fontstruction is a Faux Bezier style approach, to allow the most freedom in shaping the different letterforms and curves.
Font sample is best viewed at 2x pixel size or above for a sharp result.
I hope you like it!