Three in a row: after one lycanthropic font, another to the zombies... the third is for the scifi... and FS!.
Based on an old glyph by the magnificent and always amazing Master geneus1. Caps only. You can find an extra A at the "a" glyph and a little C placed at the "®". See also the grey version.
This is a clone of zalida 3D eYe/FSVAN NELLE (Blueprint) — Geometric modernist sans
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☛ THE SOURCE
A re-interpretation of the 1926 geometric sans serif alphabet system reproduction by Jacob Jongert, published in a 1930 sourcebook by N.J. van de Vecht. The geometric uppercase set of the alphabet system is what would later become the famous sans serif capitals which he used for lettering throughout many of his Van Nelle materials.
☛ THE FONTSTRUCTION
Attempt at making a convincing recap of the original alphabet by Jacob Jongert as it was shown in the 1930s sourcebook, and extrapolate that into a full functional font. The decision to go with a small grid sparked a number of limitations in terms of the design freedom that forced some inevitable changes. But the general idea sort of became not to make it a revival, but rather more or less a faithful revision. One that would still be instantly recognizable yet didn't necessarily had to be all about accuracy.
☛ —The small grid design made sure this wasn't happening anyway!
But, for instance, the most striking difference between the two fonts (their weight) in fact is such a byproduct for one of those limitations. Something FS's small grid couldn't properly reproduce, so VAN NELLE (Blueprint) has a slight stronger weight, making the font somewhat of a bold style version of the original. This in addition provided me with slight extra freedom to inplement a little personal touch for further manicure of the font's finer details. Which allowed me to cope with some of the optical clunkiness that come with a fatter face and the grid based design.
Besides these circumstantial differences, which were basically beyond my control, I've also made some intentional changes to make the typeface more practical to use. The changes include things like the significantly lowered ascender height, the slight different width for certain letters, larger tittle (dot above i, j & ij), and several more. despite these changes I believe it very much still reflects what Jongerts once invisioned for the system.
☛ SOME NOTES ON THE ORIGINAL AND ITS CREATOR
Jacob Jongert(1883-1942) was a advertising designer from the Netherlands. After varied studies, including being Roland Holst’s assistant and an acquaintance and colleague of S. H. de Roos [who brought the Arts & Crafts ideas of William Morris to the Netherlands and devoted his career to book design and typography] with whom Jongert experimented with several printing techniques and discovered graphic design as his ideal art form.
¶ In 1923 Jongert rolled in a unique and long-term collaboration with the Van Nelle company, where he became head designer, a position he held until 1940. The Van Nelle company had an extremely modern approach towards advertising (they even commissioned Cassandre to do a poster) and Jongert created for the firm a recognizable image with clear shapes, powerful letters and primary colours, totally Dutch avant-garde in style, and with a strict and rigorous approach directly linked to De Stijl principles. The corporate identity he created has become a milestone in the design world.
¶ The lettering, however, is the driving force that ties it all together. The style is a straightforward set of plain, mono-linear, sans serif capitals in a style that just started to come into fashion in the late 1920s, early 1930s with the rise of functionalism and geometric type design. Yet, while these ideas were already thrown out there, its clever simplicity plus the systematic and cohesive way Jongert implemented his lettering was unusual at the time. The square and minimal construction of the forms allowed the letters to contract and expand to fit any situation, yet maintain a consistent and recognizable appearance throughout the Van Nelle line. ¶ Something we only recently have learned to appreciate is to see his hand crafted system amid the current advancements in variable-font technology, which offers a similar kind of flexibility to typeface designs. A quality that certainly placed him well ahead of its time.
What I particulary like about Jongert's original is the stuff that is going on in the lowercase set of the alphabet, which are those quirky lowercase letter inventions that are different from the more traditional modernist sans, but sadly the lowercase letters were pretty much never used in his works.
I created a simple PDF typeface specimen for those who want to see the high-resolution preview.
PDF SPECIMEN WAS DELETED
Thats all Folks ☚
☛ Cheers
An experiment based on: "What if an 8 color wheel was a letter O?" A work in progress just to bring up the potential of the new update. These colors are just rainbow colors and were not inspired from LGBT flag.
Make the letters any width desired.
Type the uppercase letter for the left half of the letter, type an extender (or not), then type the same lowercase letter for the right half of the letter. The more extenders are inserted between the left and the right halves, the wider the letter becomes.
I and T are the exceptions where the extenders are typed before and after the left and right halves and not inbetween.
The other exceptions are M and W which have been split into 3 and extenders are added between the left, middle and right thirds.
? is split between ? and /
Extenders are located at @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) and _
How to extend:
A@@a, B##b, C$$c, D$$d, E##e, F%%f, G$$g, H^^h, &&Ii&&, J**j or J**$$j, K^^k, L**l, M(({((m, N((n, O$$o, P@@p, Q$$q, R%%r, S##s, (((Tt))), U**u, V**v, W**}**w, X^^x, Y^^y, Z__z, ?@@/
VON NEUHAUS — Geometric “Bauhaus”-inspired style
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This is the latest evolution of a “Bauhaus”-inspired constructivist style typeface design that originally started 5 years, or two font versions back.
To me personally this is a long awaited triumph, that has finally materialized after years worth of been haunted by this idea, and the crazy speculations about this ghost that would never be...
Well, that was untill now... So at last, I can now finally proudly present to you this latest of arrivals to come from this unforeseen series of typeface progressions.
This newborn addition is in fact the 3rd phase of this letter concept's evolution, and caused the font project to undergo a series of addaptations that graduatelly increasing the levels of sophistication possible by chaging it's internal structure and behaviour within the FontStruct-editor. This 3rd addaptation unlocks the FontStruct editor's “Expert Mode” full power potential.
Enabling all editor functionallity to provide the most versatile font creation capabilities available within FontStruct.
STF_BLAUHAUS was the font's very first version, created back in early 2019. It's the font's original concept as it innitially was first intended. It essentially started out as a personal study into the design of letters on a small grid. And more importantly, the creation of required composite bricks to do so.
The idea back then was to craft the most complex geometry possible without the use of any “Expert Mode” functionality whatsoever. Now, what this innitially did was still quite novel to me at that time, as this had led to the development of a FontStruction that was solely built from the extensive use of composite bricks. Not just a couple, but a staggering 272 composite bricks in total. Many of which in fact are quite intuitive and required certain amounts of careful thinkering with the maths found in it's geomtry to craft these custom brick compositions.
So as explained above, there was no use of any of FontStruct's “Expert Mode” functions. This meant that the option to nudge, flip or rotate any of the bricks wasn't available. Now this changes everything in respect to building complex fonts, since in order to get all the bits and pieces of a letter such as: crossbars, intersections, curves and corners properly aligned requires, a precisly fitting composite brick to be tailor-made. In terms of the FontStruct limitations, this cause the physical properties of FontStruct's brick composition tool to be fundamental as to how much complexity and refinement can be put into it's letter geometry. In other words this is fundamental as to how well crafted the design is going to look in the end, since there is no option to further manicure shape or form other than from within those bounds of the adjacent 16-brick-array grid squares of a selection for composition.
I've choosen to design the alphabet concept in this “Bauhaus”-inspired geometric style, simply because of the simplicity this style has in terms of its basic pure geometric forms. The final result became this simple and bold looking small grif display type with a “3-bricks” Em-size only.
but it had some crucial compromises that had to be made due to FontStruct's design limitations. Not terrible, but not quite perfect either.
One very important byproduct from this limitations as were described above was a huge collection of very intuitive custom brick compositions that offer seemless alignement and perfect fits, basically an extensive set of custom bricks that work in a very similar fashion as FontStruct's default “Connect” bricks.
Bringing us to the main reason for 2022's version of this font.
STF_BLAUHAUS (Plus) was the font's second version, and most recent state that it sat in for the last year, up till this now. In this 2022 version of the of this font design modification the FontStruct editor's “Expert Mode” functionality was introduced into the design. Hoping to further manicure some of these compromised critical area's in an attempt to see what refinements could be implemented to revise the 2019's original version.
Now that the option to nudge, flip or rotate bricks was available, new more complex geometric shapes suddenly became possible. This sparked an explosion of new characters and additional alternative forms. Although now the FontStruct editor got vastly more versatile and potent, it remained strongly limited by that still present 1:1 brick size filter setting. Nevertheless, this made possible a very substantial update of the older font, and allowed many new shaping capabilities.
STF_VON NEUHAUS is the 3rd and final evolition to have come from my earlier FontStruct endeavours; STF_BLAUHAUS and STF_BLAUHAUS (Plus)
This version basically saw the transition from a font only using 1:1 brick size filter into a font at 2:2 brick size filter settings to unlock all power potential of the FontStruct editor's “Expert Mode” functions.
I could now write another eqyually as long body of text, explaining what's new in this final version or which other improvements were made, or say about it whatever the hell I want, but I figure that the picture becomes even more apparent when simply comparing the 3 fonts from old to new, and see the evolution happening before your eyes.
Start with STF_BLAUHAUS, folowed by STF_BLAUHAUS (Plus), and witness the full glory of "next-level" FontStructing that made possible the last version STF_VON NEUHAUS.
I hope you like it,
Cheers
This is a clone of STF_BLAUHAUS (Plus)