Ten years ago, a StumbleUpon Fontstruct on April 8, 2008 has been one of the highlights of my life. Few things have provided so much joy and fewer things have kept my interest for so long. Type design has always been a fascination for me and the simplicity of the UI/UX of fontstruct has allowed me to explore all that I can imagine without getting in the way while letting me do as I please for the most part. In times of creativity, fontstruct was there to let it flow, and in times of personal lows, fontstruct was there to allow me to ignore that which was beyond my control. Furthermore, the overall civility and helpful nature of the fontstruct community is still one of the best on the internet. I have been using the fontstruct website almost daily for 10 years now and rarely do I not see something new that is amazing and awe inspiring. The creativity of the designers past and present is incredible.
I wish to thank FontShop for sponsoring fontstruct for so long allowing it to grow. Most importantly, I wish to thank Mr. Meek for creating and constantly enhancing this incredible gift of creativity and a calming haven for over-active minds.
Thank you.
It's called ajicis because it is built upon the letters done for the wallpaper of Wipeout 3 game team AG Sys. It has the same grid structure but the letters look nothing like the original.
Also, this FS'tion was started on the phone (because I was too lazy to get off the bed and go to the computer). When I saw potential in the created letters, it was saved and opened on the iPad. The rest of the fs was done there. The only thing that couldn't be done on the iPad was adjusting of a composite brick. (It was fixed on the laptop days later.) So, 98% iPad.
@RobMeek: The iPad version worked well. However, Menu->Edit->Copy, Menu->Edit->Paste, etc. got tedious. Can we have the menu commands in icon form docked or floating somewhere on (in?) the tablet version? The icons can be half the size of the Tools icons to save space. Also, can the tools and zoom be docked as well on the tablet version? It would be helpful. Thanks.
This is a clone of tm ajicis originalI 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.
Out of 111 bricks used, only ten are from existing bricks; all the rest are custom bricks. There would have been a lot more bricks if most weren't rotated or flipped.
3 bricks tall.
This font started offline. It wasn't even supposed to be a font. I was just showing some students the value of a grid, even as tiny as 5×5 and the thousands of possibilities it generates. It led to making an 'a'. Of course, once that exercise was over, I had to continue making other letters. It's a compulsion. Sorry. The offline idea was slightly different. Compromises had to be made due to the limitation in place by the bricks available.
I've been wanting to do this kind of font for ages, think of it as a soft square or a hard circle. Since it's been so long, I can't really remember the exact source of inspiration, but I do remember it had something to do with kix and his work.
The ability to kern now has obviously made the spacing better than it would have been otherwise. Thanks, Rob.
This font and tm Nibble started off as one. Both were different from what they have now become. The idea was to create a very heavy, minimal curves and angles to give a sense of the glyph.
It started with a plain N and a solid O. Making the E match either the N or the O resulted in deviation from the style just enough that it warranted a spin-off into a font of it's own.
Some letters—such as G and H—proved quite difficult to match in the style of either. A slight angle shift resulted in a glyph that did not go with other glyphs. I kept trying different possibilities...and at some point decided to save the discarded option into another fs, which now contains more than 200 characters.
The teardrop counter in tm Byte forced a complete redraw of all glyphs at about 2× the size.
I am already working on two additional fonts that came out of this exercise...and it might yield more.
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°).
This is a cloneIt's called Choices because this basic idea lead to numerous minor iterations that completely changed the character of the...er...characters. All the unused possibilites are now sitting dormant in another font. Perhaps they will become a full font (or three)...someday.
This is a cloneI love these kinds of fonts that have geometric puzzle-solving quality in the design. I was quite happy with how the lowercase found a way to be connected. Then I thought let me not mess with anything else. But a Z is so much like a 2, so I created the 2 out of the Z. Then when 2 was done, I was aprehensive of tackling the 1 because the vertical stem would be off by one brick, and how would that be resolved. Reluctantly I tried it...and it worked. 3 can be created from the B, but the B hasn't been created yet. OK, I guess I have to do the uppercase. A was easy. B was surpringly easy. Which gave me motivation to go on. And surprisingly soon, the whole thing came together. The hardest letters to shape were X and S. Not all letters are very successful, but they are distinctive enough to be recognized as themselves. Not sure about the =, but it will do, I suppose. In any case, no kerning required.