EPOCH - Modern light-weight geometric display sans
───── 「 MEASURES 」
(in grid units)
X-Height: 1
Cap-Height: 2
Descent: 1
Optical Corrections: None
Stroke: 1/8 th
4-Em / 0.125 : 1-Stroke (0.125 ≍ 1/8 th)
― No filters used.
───── 「 SUMMARY 」
This is yet another deep dive into the very small and tiny quantum realm of FontStruct's small grid and light-weight stokes.
Unlike some of my previous endeavours into this dark corner of the FS-editor, which could have dizzying complexity in forms, this project for once didn't stress the sh....*t out of me by stretching the limits for my capabilities beyond what is still comfortable this time. Nor did it drain every last frigging bit of my knowledge or clever creative insight to pull it off.
On the contrary,
For once it remained largely a pretty straight forward and easy project in terms of forms and geometry. The absence for most of the 'bar-raising' features such as diagonal forms, rounded, transitions or stroke modulation made this 'FontStruction' that much more easy.
And when metaphorically breaking it down to the bare naked form and necessities, this design mainly consist of FS's (default)-brick set, resized modifications of those, combined with a set of stacked composites.
There a still a number of things I'd rather seen differently, and will see later attempts at making improvement, but taken in a broad perspective most of the included material so far look pretty fine to me already. And to point out one of the things that is still bugging actually are the 'accented' letters.
Some glyphs have odd values for their 'character'-width, and this makes it impossible to achieve 'grid to em-square'-bounding box allignement in FS's editor. So accents in these asymmetrical values look slightly ofset.
― "Changing character widths to nearest even value is simply far too destructive to the stylish characteristics of the fonts appearance"
───── 「 ABOUT THE FONT 」
In the end it became a pretty cool looking light-weight geometric modernist sans-serif style that at the same time has strong hints of Art-Deco-style lettering as well.
And apart from the minor things it fell short with, I think there is a lot about its overall character-set design and forms that is looking pretty darn rad actually if you ask me.
Content-wise the font is a single case design in a 'all-caps' or Majuscule style. The (Lc)-string was kept empty for deliberately for the technical reason of preserving all the (default)-blank metrics data for any further design updates.
───── 「 WHATS INSIDE 」
A little bit of everything...
■ Body text formatting:
□ Basic-Latin based character set with accented letters & numerals
□ Most punctuation marks
□ Numerous symbols
■ Decorative formatting
□ Pictorial attributes
□ Repeating patterns
───── 「 THE END 」
Let me know what you think so far,
Cheers
TEFlonALuminium — A contemporary geometric sans-serif
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Inspired by the brand logo for French kitchen and home appliances company 'Tefal'.
The font is an extrapolation from the five letters that make up the original logo. I have made some small changes to certain characters to make them more suitable for a full font and body copy text format.
I hope you like it..
Cheers
This is a clonePrajna is a Sanskrit word meaning wisdom, understanding, insight. Simple on the outside, with some depth on the inside. Looks like it could be 1:1 bricks, but it actually uses a 1.5 sized brick width, giving it additional curvature that wouldn't be possible on a 1:1 scale.
I was supposed to release this a year ago, synchronous to the Peace 2.0 sculpture that was publicly unveiled which utilized Prajna to spell out "Peace" in 12 different languages. I like to think that since the sculpture was written with Prajna, it has a literal connection with wisdom, understanding and insight. I release it now with the hope that you may write with Prajna of your own.
FRUNTSTOCT — FontStruct logotype reinterpretation
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For all ya failed attempts at re-creating the FontStruct logo typeface.
Many have tried their take on it, most without convincing succes, and often looking downright horrible.
Two of the most commonly made mistakes are.. 1) The introduction of a uppercase alphabet 2) Having a tendency for including far too many stuff in terms of extended language and typographic support, aiming for large multi-lingual character-sets with as many glyphs possible.
The lettering for the FS-logotype has this very distinctive modular geometric stencil concept. The underlying glyph structure consists of 5 horizontal rectangular segments, that together with a custom set of simple geometric blocks form a modular system that can be easily re-modeled or re-arranged to form the different letters and required parts that help to distinguish each individual letter from one another.
The modular system itself is highly simplified and easily accessible to implement additional changes. But typically speaking a simplified modular system comes at a price. And the further a system was simplified, the greater the amount of limitations will be. Which literally translates to a reduction in overall design depth and freedom to implement a more diverse complexity.
—TECHNICAL SPECS:
[Dimensions] Segments
X-Height — 3
Cap-Height — 4
Ascender — 1
Descender — 1
[Filters] Value
Horizontal Brick Size — 2
Vertical Brick Size — 1.8
Horizontal Grid Scale — 0.9
Vertical Grid Scale — 1
In case of this FS-logotype concept, there are a number of key components that put in place this very strict window of parameter-locked propperties, that exclude all but a few remaining options which could still be exploited, and therefor fully dictate whatever is, or is not possible.
Having only 5 segments, limited geometric components and highly restrictive rearrangeable capabilities towards implementing variation all adding up to the difficulty-level for extrapolating some of its more complex and- / or denser forms, symbols accents and puntuation marks.
To cramp excessive amounts of complexity into a very narrow band of realestate would have a certain negative wear on its aesthetic qualities. And is likely to result in a combination of messy glyph composites and queer-looking letter-inventions, contrapped in a mish-mash of irregular and gawky looking, at times even disfiguring geometry that sit at the heart of this problem.
This is exactly where those bad choices can either make or break your font. The modular system for FS's lettering clearly isn't the most suitable of fonts for uppercase forms and complex geometry.
This doesn't mean that it is impossible, as was demonstrated by a small number of re-interpretations that actually do include fairly decent uppercase inventions. One of such that have successfully pulled off the inclusion of a uppercase set for his rework of the logo typeface was Zhalgas Kassymkulov—previously known as architaraz.
His attempt is a beautiful display of craftmanship and clever simplicity.
Here is a list of attempts that I think are successful re-interpretations of the original FontStruct logo:
Structurosa Italic — by four
AT Archistruct Outline — by kassymkulov
Structurosa— by pauldhunt
FS Logotype — by WeDoFonts
pixelstructia — by gamesgames
fs Colophon — by user-juli
fs sanstruct — by ETHproductions
Realised — by thezenmaster1000
Structurosa Bold — by pauldhunt
FontStrukt 2 Soft — by Jamie Place (FontBlast)
Structurosa Bold Too — by pauldhunt
— WHUTZINSIDE THIS FRUNTSTOCTION?
Now, a extensive explanation for the decision to not include uppercase forms to the font, as well as for the constraint on total character amount had been broadly covered above. I think that small caps numeral figures make a much more sleek looking glyph, and tying the overall character set much more together as a whole.
Another, and I say, rather more unique feature found in my version of the lettering is only a subtle one in fact. One that mostly works invisibly, that without the awareness of the reader, is easily missed. And can only truly visually materialize and appreciated seen up close. This is the implementation of several slight deviations and custom sculpting of certain curvatures and round features. Introducing an ever so slightly more diverse dynamic, but also taps deeper into some of that shape contrast propperties.
In addition to that I've also included several glyph alternative forms and small number of ligatures to play around with.
among these glyph alternates there is also this continuous string of 13 rather experimental looking glyph variations for the lowercase letter 's'.
These aren't actually meant to be usable characters, but instead is a collage of different configurations that make various curved geometry, and are simply stored in a glyph-style fashion that provides an actual physical estimation on their appearence and for me to test their functional values in a text format.
So far so good,
I am happy with how the font turned out to be, it is fairly consistent looking and still remains quite usable as a font.
That's all for now folks...
Cheers.
BATAVIER (Pro) — Geometric display sans
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[ MEMOIR ]
Revision / revival of the geometric lettering seen on a 1916 Dutch litho poster for the Wm H. Müller & Co.'sRotterdam-London passenger service called Batavier-Line(Batavier-Lijn in Dutch) which was originally designed by Bart van der Leck(1876 - 1958).
The Batavier Line existed from 1830-1960, and was the oldest steam shipping line in The Netherlands.
[ UPDATE INTEL ]
A couple of small changes were implemented compared to v/d Leck's original lettering. Most significant is the upscaled Ampersand, but numerous other small cosmetic or optimizing modifications were made as well.
I completed the full alphabet plus numerals and included additional symbols and punctuation marks to make it a fully functional typeface. The lettering is all caps (majescule) only. Some lowercase letter locations harbour a glyph alternate uppercase form as could be seen in the original litho poster source. Another bunch of alternate uppercase forms and underlined “superior” small capital letters were located in the “Halfwidth And Fullwidth Forms” Unicode block. In addition to that it has accented Latin letters for multilingual support. Also two resized alternate forms for the Ampersand and two stylish ligatures have been included.
[ SUMMARY ]
This is actually the second revision I did for the litho lettering by v/d Leck. The first attempt was made using a (faux-) Bézier approach, resulting in a huge grid canvas (168 grid units / bricks tall monstrosity). This made it a lot of hard work to build and for some letters impossible to properly implement kerning since FS values only allows min. -10 / max. 10 of grid units for kerning.
As part of the endeavor to refurbish some of my older FontStructions STF BATAVIER was one of those that was in serious need of some overhauling as well. The problem it presented was the font's cap-height. It was actually so tall and impractical to work and / or modify, that the first revival attempt never really fully materialized beyond a basic character set.
A full glyph only fitted on screen with the FS-editor zoomed-out max. and my browser zoomed-out at 30%. At this scale not only the canvas grid lines in FS's editor all but dissapeared, but it also resulted in a down-sized brick (or 1 square grid unit) with on-screen rendering at only 3×3 pixels, as oposed to 64×64 pixels with the FS-editor's default zoom settings.
So imagine selecting a tiny 3×3 px speck when working the glyph canvas at brick level to modify glyphs... pretty much impossible. Now, the other situation wasn't a whole lot better. This had the browser's zoom restored back to 100%, making the glyph canvas at brick level “workable” again. But in respect to the cap-height this only renders a very small section of the glyph on-screen. Requiring a huge deal of additional canvas navigation in FS's canvas editor, better known as “Pan the view (H)”, which is done with the hand tool.
And well, as many of you will know, this is an absolute bummer When navigating (or panning) a glyph bottom to top requires 3 full canvas swipes.
So yeah, the only way for an extended version ever to materialize was to be rebuild it from the ground up at a much small scale, using very different measurement ratios compatible with FontStruct's kerning.
[ TECH INTEL ]
This second revision attempt successfully reduced the font's cap-height down to a comfortable 5 bricks (or grid units) tall and Em-square of 7 bricks total. Some optical compensations were implemented to certain elements such as stroke weight corrections and careful minute differences in vertical positioning of letter mid-section elements.
For now thats all Folks..
Cheers
Included in the sample image is a silhouette of a move called the Backhand 1990, invented by yours truly as one of the founding members of Rock Force Crew in the SF Bay Area. Bust It!
Larger sample available here.
This is a clone