When Bauhaus met Blackletter

When Bauhaus met Art Deco

[Click Pixel in the font viewer, then click Shift+Pixel four times to view the font correctly]

I love it when fonts come together like this one.

It started as me thinking what can I do for the 'twenties' that isn't 1920s. (thalamic has done those before!). The idea that I was toying with was doing each letter on a grid of 20 parts (blocks, stripes, etc.). There is already a stripes font in development (which is unlikely to be shared any time soon). I thought maybe I could convert it to a 20 stripe version. But it's too optical illusion-y and requires blocks of free time at a stretch for me to visualize the letters, which I don't have. Then the idea came to just develop a new block that says 20 on it and use it as a pixel for some pixel font. Which led to thinking an XX is 20 in Roman numerals. So I thought develop a grid that reads XX in multiple ways and directions. 

With that basic idea, I started tinkering with the fontstructor and soon realized that I will need a lot of bricks. That necessitated making custom X and O bricks. That gave rise to the basic grid block of 7x7 grid that can be used as something that can be "carved" to form various letters. Better in theory than practice. M is OK, but a 7 brick wide A is just too wide. Plus the larger Xs were too white. Had to create more custom bricks to take away some of the whiteness that left the X still visible. These additional custom bricks were cumbersome to make...mainly because of my limited ability to visualize which brick placed where in a 4x4 grid will create what shape but also because I was using quarter brick corner triangles which meant that each brick of the 4x4 grid was internally a 2x2 grid as well. So a 8x8 grid really with 64 internal smaller bricks. Some bricks required making a custom brick and then merging it with another custom brick several times over to have the correct custom brick. Of course, I didn't know if the pain-stakingly created custom brick will be appropriate or not. 

Much experimentation later, finally figured out what to do with this idea. Once all the custom bricks were created and the basic look of the font developed, then it was just a matter of placing the bricks in the right place. Often times not even that as one letter was just a modified version of another letter...like D and 3 are just a modified B; L and F are modified E, etc. 

This was supposed to be a joke entry that didn't take much time to make. It's still a joke entry not to be taken seriously...but it did take time...and provided puzzle-like geometric challenge to overcome. Very fun.

How could I not love fontstruct!?

Big Brother is watching you. Or maybe space aliens?

Obviously dedicated to the great Sergio Leone and his Spaghetti Western "Dollars Trilogy" filmed in Almería. The uppercase was shot. Contains some extra western dingbats, keep your head down.

This font has been almost 3 years in the making. Mostly because how tedius it was to keep copying the same "bricks" over and over.  I'm glad it is finished enough to share. I may or may not (most likely) add more glyphs later.

This font was created around the theme of decay. I took inspiration from shapes and forms within the pieces of a badger's spine and manipulated them to construct the alphabet. Here is my blog :) > http://hollydennis.tumblr.com/ website> www.hollydennisdesign.com

When Blackletter met Art Deco

Been working on this for a while. I though now it's time to publish it and see what you think...

04.04.20. Lockdown 2020. 
Lockdown doesn't mean you cant level up.
It doesn't have to feel like you're behind bars.
It could be used as a time for personal transformation.
Affecting your outer world by expressing your inner world.
Fonstructing can be a meditative experience.
It all depends on your perspective.
You can fontstruct as a way of creating cool fonts,
or you can see it as creative expression that forms letters,
that spawn words, that serve as the visualization of thought
that manifests deeper meaning. Or not.
Peace, Health, and Wellness to all!

Fontstuff:

Uppercase = worn down brick walls
Lowercase = plain walls
| = 4 bars
- = 1 bar
( & ) = Bent pipes open/close
{ & } = Scaled pipes open/close

Inspired by the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, specifically the Willow chair. I'm not sure how "twenties" this font is, especially since the Willow chair was designed in 1902, but it seems to kinda fit.

TwentiesComp entry, inspired by art deco architecture. Not sure about the V, left some variations there for comparison. Also the uppercase/lowercase grave and acute are different, would like to hear which you prefer.

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 is my homage to the late Dutch master. I tried to capture the impossible geometry, sense of space, and even the colours of his works. You can see and download the new v2 here:

Hommage a Escher v2

and

Hommage a Escher v2 extLat

.

CLICK ON THE “PIXEL” BUTTON TO MAKE IT LOOK, LIKE, A BAJILLION TIMES BETTER.

INTENDED LANGUAGE SUPPORT

• ENGLISH

• MĀORI

• SLOVENIAN

• RUSSIAN

THINGS THAT FONTSTRUCT NEEDS

• A DITHERING TOOL

• AN ELLIPSE TOOL

• RECTANGULAR-  AND ELLIPTICAL-OUTLINE TOOLS.

• A BUCKET FILL TOOL

• RULERS

• A SKEWABLE GRID

• A MASS KERNING FEATURE (OR EVEN AUTOMATIC KERNING, THAT’D BE NICE)

• SUPPORT FOR MULTIPLE FAMILIES WITHIN ONE FILE

• A TERMINAL FOR PROGRAMMING ALGORITHMS TO AUTOMATE REPETITIVE, PREDICTABLE ASPECTS, AND A WAY TO REFERENCE THE GRID SQUARES AS AN ARRAY OF SOME KIND

DON’T THINK THAT I’M SHOUTING ABOUT THIS. I JUST DON’T LIKE LOWER-CASE LETTERS!

ELEVATED (REWORK) - A large 3D outline display typeface design with shadow effect.

It's inspired by the lettering from a sketch by great Dutch graphical designer "Jurriaan Schrofer".

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This is the long overdue shadow style variant which was requested by Goatmeal and elmoyenique. It has the diagonal shading lines included (as was also presented in the original sketch by Jurriaan Schrofer)

Due to the inexperience that I had in my early days of FontStructing and the lack of proper knowledge about raster scaling, I faced some serious issues regarding the correct size distribution. This had me unable to include the diagonal lines properly into that pre-existing font with them having equal seporation and white space througout the entire design.

So instead of making a clone of my previously published version "STF_ELEVATED" and include the shadow font variant into that family as a seporate FontStruction (like I did with most other style variations back then), I decided to rebuild the full font. Putting it all together into this single re-worked font version.

This re-work has some important differences compared to the previous version. The first one, another size to grid ratio which optimizes the size distribution for digital display as well as drastically reduces the overall glyph size (more accurate version forthcoming). Some extra characters were added to the set, making it a slightly more functional basic font.

The shadow effect is the default style for this font, this also includes all numerals, punctuation marks and other symbols that make up the full font, these occupy the uppercase. The bare outline style A-Z glyphs occupy the lowercase.

Enjoy!

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a twenties-era art deco typewriter font with a glyph count in the twenties for the twenties competition

Decorative, ArtDeco-ish all uppercase font for TwentiesComp. Got carried away and added Cyrillic too ;) Enjoy!

Outline-Mix aus Bauhaus und Art Deco

Paris, Berlin, Moscow in the 1920s... Art Deco, Bauhaus, Konstruktivizm... Effervescent people! This font is for Sandrine, the woman with white hat in the picture, and for all the people who together built the world. See also ztefan and zergei.

So the idea behind this one is that as you type you're creating a city scene.  The spaces are empty intersections.  The slash marks are slightly askew telephone poles.  The quotation marks are flocks of birds.  Etc.  From a distance it can be a bit illegible.  It's primarily meant for large letters or close up scrutiny.

An inspired font in it's ugly adolescence hoping to be so much more.