My final entry in the competition. Inspired by Mazey, zlabyrinths eYe/FS, and wavelength. Each glyph has its own maze, and each maze connects with the next. Tilde ~ and low line _ connect words, grave ` closes beginnings and ends, and the left and right arrows < > are for the start and end. There are also some alternates in Extended Latin A. Suggestions and critiques are welcome. Thanks!
UPDATES:
04/06/14 The whole font has been updated to be one brick taller, and thus properly fit onto a grid. Also, some characters have been redesigned. V2.0
05/13/14 All punctuation has been modified to continue a word maze. V2.1
07/05/14 1000 downloads! Hooray! As a 'thank you', I've completed more of More Latin. V2.2
08/22/14 I've made the accents part of the maze. I've also changed a few characters, and added Œ and œ. V2.3
08/04/15 Added Polish support with Ą, Ć, Ę, Ł, Ń, Ś, Ź, and Ż. Tweaked a few characters as well, and added a crossbar to the ð. V2.4
06/18/16 Added support for multiple languages with more Cyrillic chars and punctuation. Also tweaked a few chars.
This font was inspired by the works of Christophe Szpajdel (Lord of the Logos, 2010, Die Gestalten Verlag), as well as by the film trilogy and the following game titles (e.g. Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, 2014) based on Tolkien's epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Given the game theme, and the 48 bricks vertical limit, I thought more or less around pixel art, or pixel fonts. This is my endeavour to make a spiky blackletter in Szpajdel's black metal style that evokes the terror of Mordor at pixel level. This font has been extensively tested for best kerning, yet some issues might have remained unresolved.
This is a cloneWhat began nearly 8 years ago as an experiment in multi-stage, multi-resolution pixel serif type drafting (starting smallish then manually upscaling x4), took on the robust character you see here after countless edits and some tricky lessons learned along the way.
The initial weight was on the light side (cloned privately for posterity), so I took a leap into this bookish weight by fattening each glyph copy-pasted 1 pixel shifted both up and to the right. A rudimentary technique, by no means novel, yet almost wholly effective. I saw fit from here to only make a handful of corrections, keeping the slightly rounded and slanted serif shape that resulted as well as the subtle reenforcing of a pen-nib construction.
More intriguing is the 1-bit “anti-aliasing” scheme I found myself progressively guided toward while finding the lines of these curves developing the initial light weight. Implied diagonals and said curves – as well as refinement of contrast – are substantially more granular and specific than had I taken a black-and-white posterized, or stairstepped approach.
At half-resolution, the resulting smoothness is acceptible. This type of hinting will be useful in developing a substitution rule set consisting of subpixel slanted or curved bricks to produce a “vectorized” version.
Indeed, such a process could be purely automated by a proficient developer or properly trained neural network (this would be a really interesting future feature for fontstruct pro – rather than hinting a font after painstaking vector construction, why not reverse the process by way of en vogue ai-assisted upscaling?).
Basic accented charaters and numerals are being added as I churn through the extended character set...