Competition: Reverse

“When I am drawing letters, I use the same approach. I am drawing the white shapes not the black strokes.”

– Cyrus Highsmith in “Eye Magazine”

Dear FontStructors,

Peace, love and fair bricks to you all.

By popular demand, and with all the additional bricks and other improvements in the HTML5 FontStructor, it’s high time for a new competition.

The theme this time around is “Reverse” which you are welcome to understand in any sense e.g. inverted, backwards, opposite, negative, or however else you wish to interpret it – literally or metaphorically.

Remember to tag your entry with “Reversecomp” before the 8th of July and don’t forget to upload a sample image.

Before starting, please read the rules below carefully, even if you are a frequent FontStructor.

Competition Time Period

Monday, 19th June 2017 – Saturday 8th July, 2017

Competition Rules

1. You must be a registered FontStruct user.
2. Your submission(s) must be posted and made “public” between 19th June 2017 and Saturday 8th July, 2017. Although you are encouraged to share your submission(s) at any time between these dates, your FontStruction submission(s) must be public (marked “share with everyone”) no later than 8th July, 2017 at 11pm PST. Additionally, your submission(s) must remain public at least until 15th July 2017 in order to give the judges enough time to review all qualifying entries.
3. Your submission(s) must be tagged with a “Reversecomp” tag. (For fairness, during the competition time period, no FontStruction with the “Reversecomp” tag will be awarded a Top Pick.)
4. Your submission(s) must be downloadable. If your FontStruction cannot be downloaded, the submission will not be including in the judging.
5. Your submission must be a newly published FontStruction. Simply adding the “Reversecomp” tag to an already published font is not allowed.
6. For each submission, you must post at least one sample image in the comments of the FontStruction.
7. No letters in each submission can be MORE THAN 48 grid squares high.
8. FontStruct cloning is permitted but the judges will be looking for original work.
9. You may enter up to three FontStructions to the competition.
10. This is a friendly competition. Cheering, favoriting and fun banter is encouraged but cruel and uncivil behavior will not be tolerated.
11. No rules regarding licensing. You may choose any license you like for your FontStruction.

Judging and announcing the winners

All qualifying FontStructions will by judged by the FontStruct staff and guest judges, July 8th–15th. Three prizewinners will be chosen. One of these will be the FontStructors’ Favorite. Winners will be announced in a FontStruct Blog post on Monday July 17th.

Prizes

Each winner can choose a t-shirt printed with a FontStruction glyph of their choice.

FontStructors’ Favorite

The valid entry with the greatest number of legitimate favorites at 11pm PST on 15th July 2017 will be one of the three prizewinners.

Questions?

If you have questions just add them as comments to this post.

May the best FontStruction win.

FontStructions in header image are, from left to right, fs Unstruct by William Leverette (will.i.ૐ), Negative Shadow by Kai Harrison,  zouvenir2U eYe/FS by elmoyenique, Upside Down by cmunk, paper cut by ben17, inverted by cmunk and Bloxed by cayo.

Connecting Bricks

Dear FontStructors,

Today we’re introducing a couple of enhancements to the FontStructor editor.

New “Connecting” Brick Pack

Firstly, we’re adding 58 new bricks to FontStruct.

As the number of available bricks has increased over the years, and with the addition of these new bricks, we’ve decided to break up the “All Bricks” palette into multiple pages or “packs”.

“All Bricks” is now named simply “Bricks” and the currently selected pack is shown in the palette title. Just click on the down arrow to switch packs.

The classic, core bricks will be remain in the default “Core” pack, but now you also have access to the new “Connecting” pack.

The connecting pack includes monoline, biline and triline shapes, curves, lengths, terminals and miscellaneous connectors, which join perfectly and easily with one another. It’s a fun and novel FontStructing experience.

Note that in order for the junctions between these new bricks to match, the connecting points need to be centred within each grid square, so a small gap always remains, to the left and below your designs.

To compensate for this you can use the nudge tool (expert mode) to nudge your glyphs, so that they line up with the origin.

I look forward to seeing what our community can create with these new raw materials. We may add a few more bricks to the connecting pack in the coming weeks.

No more default “Cycle” pen

This has been a very long time coming I know. Now, finally, the standard “simple” pen is the default pen type in the FontStructor, and the cycle pen is an option.

Happy FontStructing!