FontStruct – our website, our modular font editor – has always been free to use, and FontStruct will remain free to use for everyone.
Thanks to our generous sponsors, past and present (thank you Glyphs App!), and to our advertisers, we have secure funding to keep the bricks flowing through 2021 and beyond.
But, as this blog post hopes to explain, we have reached a point where we need to look at how the project supports itself financially, in order to keep moving forward.
Today, to try and address our funding challenge, we’re introducing a new micro-sponsorship scheme called “FS Patrons”.
By contributing a small sum (5€ / month, or 55€ annually) you can become what we’re calling an “FS Patron”.
Sold already?! You can subscribe here. Unsure? Read on …
The benefits of being an FS Patron
As an FS Patron, aside from revelling in the happy knowledge that you are directly supporting the FontStruct, you will receive a few tangible and guaranteed benefits:
No adverts
No nag-screens (We are introducing these for certain FontStruct pages. They will remind you about FS Patrons. You will notice them soon).
Optionally, an initimable badge of honour for your avatar.
We also plan to reserve some new features exclusively for Patrons.
For example, from today, we will be offering new download settings, including the option of OpenType CFF downloads, for Patrons only (you can read more about this exciting development in a separate blog post).
As time goes on, and as additional new features are added, we hope that exclusive features will be opened up to the rest of the community. In this way, “FS Patrons” is intended to function as a kind of early-access/preview programme. You may be familiar with this kind of model if you use “Patreon” – where creators release material exclusively and early to their patrons, before a subsequent public release.
Why does FontStruct need FS Patrons?
– Asterias Fontstructi commonly known as “Staff pick stars”, pictured in their natural environment. Considered a delicacy by FontStructors, they are in fact a common species. While easy to find, they can prove perilous for staff to gather. Their brittle, razor-sharp points, and their preference for the slipperiest of rock pools necessitates the wearing of thick gloves and expensive footwear. Best harvested shortly after high-tide. Photo by Brian Yurasits
FontStruct is busy all year-round, 24/7, with FontStructors from all around the globe: from school and college students to budding amateur typographers and established designers.
Browsing through the amazing archive of modular typography that’s accumulated in the gallery is a daily joy. We are boundlessly proud of everything that the FontStruct community has achieved over the last 12+ years.
We have welcomed over 1.5 million registered users to the site, and there are over 1.8 million FontStructions great and small adorning the database. That’s a total of almost 50 million glyphs!
– These are some quite big numbers – A great crowd of people, and a great heap of data to administer and care for.
For the FontStruct staff there are always support mails waiting for an answer, servers to maintain and content to moderate. We have hosting and CDN bills to pay. We have bugs to fix.
In an ideal world, we would not only busy ourselves with maintenance and support. We would also spend time designing, developing and delivering new features, improving our users’ experience, writing new blog posts, updating our documentation, running competitions and investing time in moderating site content. We are doing all these things – but, because of our very limited resources, we can only do so slowly and patchily.
Pixel bricks are not a natural product. Mixed according to a secret recipe and baked each night in industrial trays, they need to cool to room temperature before being fed into through the precision cutting machines. Photo by Andrew Moca
The truth is that the “FontStruct Staff” does not really exist. While FontStruct has many kind friends who continue to help and support us in one way or another, and of course there is the wonderful “we” of the FontStructor community, there is no real “we” here at FontStruct towers. Since 2010, I (Rob Meek) have run FontStruct as a personal project from wherever I am, usually from a room in my flat. I’m sitting there now on a late Sunday afternoon, writing this blog post, having spent most of the day so far making some very silly pictures of imaginary brick harvests.
But FontStruct is not a one-person show. It’s less than that. Because FontStruct brings in no significant revenue, and in order to actually pay the bills, I need to spend the majority of my time doing work that has nothing directly to do with FontStruct. For example, working as the lead developer for the wonderful Fonts In Use, as well as for the excellent new type foundry Fontwerk. I also regularily work freelance for the design agency CDLX. – These are all great jobs which I enjoy but I have other clients as well and I could happily drop some of them. – So, in reality, the human resources available to this project are very thin indeed.
I’d like to work more for FontStruct, more frequently and I’d like to be paid for some of it. That’s why I’m launching “FS Patrons”.
– Circle bricks are actually a perfectly spherical fruit, best harvested in the early morning. Only the ripest, roundest examples are good enough for the FontStructor. Photo by Bambi Corro
But don’t worry!
All things considered, with or without “FS Patrons”, our project remains healthy. Technically we are in a reasonable place, and we will continue to manage well with the limited funding we currently enjoy. Personally I continue to love most of the work I am able to do on the project, so I’m not going to walk away …
… but, given more funding, I would be able to dedicate some more time to FontStruct, and work on more new features, such as, for example:
improving the way we present character sets
extending unicode support
adding layers
supporting colour fonts
supporting custom bricks
supporting some OpenType features
adding real support for non-latin scripts
sorting out the abysmal gallery search
updating the site design
– All these things will take a long time to implement, with or without additional funding, but your support can help to accelerate the process.
So, if you’d like and if you can (I know times are tough for many!), please consider becoming an FS Patron.
Note: This blog post is about a FontStruct feature which is currently exclusive to FS Patrons.
Today we’re excited to introduce a new kind of download for our Patron FontStructors: OpenType font files using CFF outlines with the .otf filename suffix.
All FontStruct downloads have been OpenType font files for quite a while now, but OpenType fonts can contain different kinds of “outline” (in FontStruct, the outlines are the actual brick shapes).
Hitherto, we have only offered downloads with TrueType outlines. From today, we’re also offering CFF outlines.
CFF outlines differ from TrueType in several ways, including:
(mostly) Smaller file sizes.
(often) More accurate and economical description of curves. For example, rounder circles.
(optionally and experimentally) “fixed point” coordinates, which may facilitate more accuracy of detail for certain downloads.
Smaller File Sizes
The new CFF downloads will often be smaller than their TrueType counterparts. For example, the illustration shown below uses the font “zporty eYe/FS” by elmoyenique. This has a font file size of 444K for the TrueType download, and only 162K for the CFF – that’s much less than half the size. File size is important, as fonts take up memory and large fonts can crash software. Some downloaded FontStructions are very large!
More Accurate and Economical Curves
In a CFF file, curves are represented using two control points (these curves are called “cubic béziers”), as opposed to the TrueType outline format which represents curves using single control points (“quadratic béziers”). For many FontStructions this difference may not be noticeable, but in some cases you will find that CFF outlines are more accurate. For example, you can see the distinction clearly in the case of circular bricks, especially when you use a great number of small circles in your design:
Some of you may have noticed the dough-like melting which afflicts FontStruct’s circle bricks in TrueType downloads. Many years ago, Luc Devroye shamed FontStruct on this point, and quite right too! Things have improved in the intervening time, but CFF outlines now give us our best, and most reliable circles ever!
Fixed Point Coordinates
We’ve also added an option to create CFF outlines with “fixed point” coordinates. I’d like to stress that this is quite an unusual format variant. As far I as I know, it’s seldom employed in professional type production.
In a standard OpenType font, all the contour points are placed on a grid of possible positions, the resolution of which is called the “em square”. Roughly speaking, if you have an em square of 1000, then all your contour points must sit on a 1000 x 1000 unit grid. “Design with Fontforge” has a good page explaining the em square format.
OpenType fonts with TrueType outlines traditionally use an em square of 2048 or 1024 (the former is the default for FontStruct) while OpenType with CFF outlines generally have an em square of 1000 (Although it can be more. We’re trying 2000 as FontStruct’s default for CFF.)
Crucially, all the points in your designs have to sit exactly on the intersections of this notional grid. So, in a standard OpenType font, despite it being an infinitely-scalable vector format, there are very clear and finite limits as to where your points can sit. You can position a point at exactly a grid coordinate of (100,100), but not at (100.5, 100.5). i.e. You can only have integer (whole number) coordinates.
From today, FontStruct also gives you access to an option, allowed by CFF, which overcomes this limitation. You can choose to define your coordinates as “fixed point” numbers. This will not affect your design work the FontStructor, but it will affect accuracy when it comes to converting your design to a font file. Using fixed point numbers, the font generator can position points more “freely”, at 100.5, 100.5 or even 100.3333, 100.3333 etc. if it needs to.
To be honest, I’m not sure how useful this fixed-point coordinate option will prove to be, but considering how complex and detailed some FontStructions are, it may help in exceptional cases. We will see!
It’s important to note, that if you do opt for fixed-point coordinates, this will make your download sizes significantly larger.
To support our new download format, we’ve added some additional download configuration options to the FontStruction pages, and also one important option on your personal settings page.
On your personal settings page, you can opt to allow any of your shared designs to be downloaded by others as OpenType fonts. You can also override this setting on a FontStruction-by-FontStruction basis.
On the FontStruction page, you can access the new options by clicking on “Advanced Settings…”
– Here you will find a couple of familiar options along with some new ones.
You can now choose to:
Share alternate formats (i.e. OpenType CFF) with other users (only if you are sharing the FontStruction for download of course). This setting overrides the global setting from your personal settings page.
Choose an em Square for TrueType and CFF downloads from a list of sensible options.
Use fixed point coordinates. (experimental)
Interested in using CFF downloads today? Not a patron yet? Learn more …
As promised, today we’re introducing a series of new features, enhancements and bug fixes to FontStruct.
Line Height Control (Vertical Metrics)
Until now, FontStruct has automatically calculated the overall line-height and line-spacing for each downloaded font. This is usually fine, but every now and again people request manual control over these values.
Today we’re giving FontStructors this option. To use it, first select “View” and then “Line Height” from the menu (You need to be in Expert Mode):
– Select Line Height from the Menu in Expert Mode
Two new lines labelled “top” and “bottom” appear on the canvas. You can simply drag these lines to specify a height for the font. The lines snap to 1/8 of a grid square when dragged and dropped and you can click on the little reset button to go back to the default, automatic calculation.
– Adjust and Reset the Line Height lines.
The values which you specify like this will be stored in your downloaded font file. In accordance with the first law of FontStruct – thou shalt not make things unnecessarily complicated – that’s all there is to it!
Please note that a lot of desktop software will still ignore or mangle whatever vertical metrics values are stored in a font file. So you may not always achieve the precise desired effect. For anyone interested, some souls braver than I have researched and documented the history of this mess elsewhere.
Anyway, I think FontStruct’s new feature will suffice to solve many line height problems, and you will find that some desktop software (Glyphs for example) will indeed respect your placement of the new lines.
Improved PhoneStructor (Touch Support in the Editor)
The FontStructor editor and the FontStruct website have been kind of usable on phones and tablets for quite a while now, but in reality, FontStructing on a touch devices has hitherto been cumbersome and impracticable.
With today’s update, we’re adding a series of interface optimisations to significantly improve FontStructing for users of touch devices and small displays, including …
1. Finally, a tap-friendly Menu!
The dropdown menu, which simply didn’t work on touch devices, now does. Note that the “Expert Mode” toggle now appears as part of this menu on small displays.
2. The Toolbar is docked and augmented
To keep it out of the way whilst drawing, the toolbar is now automatically docked to the top of the screen. Some commonly used actions (undo, redo and fullscreen) have also been added for ease of access. Note that the docked toolbar only appears on very small screens (phones in portrait mode), tablets are unaffected.
3. Improved Zoom
Pinch-to-zoom is now possible, making the zoom palette superfluous and so freeing up valuable screen space for drawing.
4. Brick Palette Toggle
The brick palette (My Bricks and All Bricks) can now be toggled with a single tap. This gives you swift access to your bricks while also freeing up more screen space for drawing.
5. Character Selector also works!
Something else which didn’t work properly on touch devices until now was the scroll functionality on the character selector. It does now. We’ve made the arrow buttons and the letter selectors themselves a bit bigger to suit your fingertips, and you can even swipe along the list of characters to scroll through them.
Miscellaneous Fixes and Improvements
In addition to Vertical Metrics controls and improved touch support we’ve also made a number of diverse tweaks to the site and the editor.
1. Spontaneous Brick Swap Fix
This will be familiar to some of you as the worst bug in FontStruct: You save your work, then after reloading it the following day, you find that “gremlins” have swapped out some of your bricks overnight and your design is corrupted.
– This has proved a very difficult bug to reproduce and fix, but we are introducing a change today which hopefully will improve matters. Fingers crossed!
If anyone does experience this problem again in the future, please let us know, especially if you can provide us with detailed steps to reproduce the problem.
2. Cyrillic in the Widget
Recently, more FontStructors have been adding Cyrillic letters to their fonts or making purely Cyrillic designs. We’ve added a Cyrillic preview option to the widget to support this trend. Suggestions for a better Cyrillic sample text are welcome.
3. Links in descriptions
The editor for writing FontStruction descriptions was broken, making it impossible to add proper links in descriptions. That should be fixed now.
4. Comment Removal
You can now remove your own comments for up to one hour after you have made them.
5. Improvements to Glyphs Export
We’ve made a few improvements to the Glyphs Export functionality.
Firstly, we updated the export to work with the latest version of Glyphs.
Secondly we added the FontStruct grid in every export, so you can now continue to reference the same grid in Glyphs.
Thirdly we have made the export behave differently when you are exporting a “pure” pixel font (i.e. one consisting only of pixel bricks and without any filters). When you export a pixel font like this, the exported file will be compatible with the official Glyphs Pixel font plugin, which is actually pretty cool. Now you can move seamlessly from working in FontStruct to working in Glyphs. Thanks to @gingerbreadman and @glyphsapp for encouraging and helping us get this one done.
6. Removal of the “Contribute to Google Fonts” Button.
We love Google Fonts and have benefited greatly from their support in recent years, but we’ve decided to remove this button from the site.
Unfortunately there were technical issues with keeping the functionality working consistently at our end, and overall it did not seem that this form of submission was working very well.
We continue to encourage designers whose work fulfils the Google Font criteria to submit their work for consideration to them, and we will keep the OFL license option (this is the principal requisite license for Google Fonts) as a permanent part of FontStruct.
Future submissions of FontStructions to Google Fonts will have to be made manually and independently of FontStruct.
7. Grid-coordinate Display
This is an experimental one. If you are in “Expert Mode” you will now see the current grid coordinates in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.
8. “Desert rescue” feature
Every now and again someone gets in touch having somehow panned off into the unmapped farther reaches of the grid. They’ve lost all orientation and have no idea where the baseline or origin is.
Clearing the browser cache was the old advice here, but now much more conveniently, you can simply double click or double tap on the “hand” panning tool to return the grid to its default position and find your way home.
Many thanks to all participants for another tremendous Structathon.
I hope everyone had as much enjoyment building their FontStructions as I did in seeing all your diverse and wonderful ideas land in the Gallery over the past few weeks.
There’s one thing I haven’t enjoyed so much: The judging. To those of you whose work is not mentioned in this post: I’m genuinely sorry! The selection included below is just a subjective sampling.
There were many, many other entries which could easily have won had the wind at FontStruct Towers swirled in a different direction on the day.
Anyway, let’s start with a review of some of the standout entries.
Alien Folk
I love the psychedelic, folk-horror connotations of “The Eyes Have It” from jonrgrover. When I retire to roam the hollow ways in my spooky carnival wagon, I’ll be daubing these glyphs on the side.
KD erutuF from architaraz also teasingly marries the primitive and the futuristic. If that black obelisk from “2001: A Space Odyssey” had some runes carved into its base, I believe they would look exactly like this.
zmokephantom eYe/FS from elmoyenique is an oddball amongst oddballs, a bizarre rippling italic, perhaps the first FontStruction to actually melt the bricks, while Galactic Gothic from bluemon is an ingenious attempt to hack blackletter and technoid features into a single font.
Techno Stencil
Quite a number of entries explored a classically technoid, futuristic trope with heavy, slabby designs – fonts all ready to be stencilled on the hull of a rusting, refurbished star-cruiser. Cyberbug from elzero, Broad Band Ultrawide from japanyoshi, Future Proof from four, Stardrifter, also from elzero and Rollerball_1 from JingYo are all examples for this genre and demonstrate the excitingly diverse possibilities within it.
Future Restraint
Some visions of the future were cleaner and more restrained.
Zoltank is a constructivist-flavoured, geometric display face from FontStruct’s long-time master of retro-futuristic typography, our very own Stanisław Lem, V.Sarela (I hope that’s a compliment. It’s intended as one).
Designed for “the future of Telerobotic medicine.” I recommend reading geneus1’s full explanation for the cool and elegant G1 Prone.
Like Zoltank, Cosmoknot by time.peace is expertly FontStructed and subtly complex. I believe it to be the only outline font among the entries. It’s full of fun glyph shapes, and makes a neat, oblique reference to the NASA worm.
I also really enjoyed Neo-Tokyo from Frodo7. Hints of flicking brushwork bring life to the otherwise technoid forms.
Catch and Patch
– Two leet entries from FontStructing legends. db Catch by beate has no obvious futuristic reference or connotation that I can see but it’s a fascinating and highly original entry. I love the internal dots on the i and j, and the umläute. Are they the “catch”?
And then we come to the mysterious, the ominous FS Patchman.
From William Leverette, the designer who discovered and shared the original brick stack hack, we have the promise of a new technique called “brick patching”. This may not be the FontStruction of the future, but could it be the future of FontStructing? I’m mesmerised by the x-rayed ‘S’ in William’s sample:
The Prizewinners
– In no particular order, as chosen by you and by our guest judge Ivo Gabrowitsch. There are actually four rather than three prizewinners since I asked Ivo for one winner too many.
First up, “G1 Nanocore” by geneus1. Apparently inspired by certain whacky contemporary ideas, this is a really fun font and sensitive microscopes may reveal it to be in your bloodstream already. I recommend reading geneus1’s own description of his design.
Next, Padomela LDR from Neoqueto. This was actually Ivo’s number one choice – “the closest to my projection of the future.”
Thalamic wins twice over (only one prize though sorry!). Ivo chose tm Forward as a favourite (“I like the more organic projection of the future”) while the “people’s favourite” was the ingenious font-within-a-font “tm two in one”.
As with beate’s other entry, the relationship to the future is unclear, but Ivo could not resist the impressive qualities of db tempo.
Finally (number two on Ivo’s list) I’m really delighted that someone new has made it onto the podium for this competition. Congratulations to japanyoshi for kognigear – a simple but usable design, clearly addressing the theme with a well developed character set.
Prizewinners will be contacted by email over the next few days.
Watch this space!
We’ll be adding a few new features to FontStruct over the next couple of weeks, so please stay tuned for an announcement on that – or follow FontStruct on Twitter if that’s your kind of thing.
Thanks!
To Ivo Gabrowitsch for helping us out again with judging. Having worked for brands like FontShop, FontFont, MyFonts, Linotype, and Monotype, Ivo understands the type business like no other. His company Fontwerk is dedicated to help type designers and foundries making a living with their passion.
And, as always, thanks to our principal sponsor Glyphs.
Please remember that you can get 10% off the Glyphs desktop font editing software (OSX only) if you buy it from the FontStruct website. This is an exclusive offer and by taking it up, you will also help support the free FontStruct service.
Are you tired of looking to the past for inspiration? Feeling jaded by the present state of the world?
Perhaps it is time for something different; time to slip over into that unexplored and limitless country which borders happily on all of our heres and nows: The Future!
Let the bricks be levied …
Let the grid be burnished bright and the curtains drawn …
It is time for a new FontStruct competition.
Competition Brief
The theme of our competition is “Future”.
As always, feel free to interpret the term in any way you choose – literally, metaphorically, as tenuously as you dare … You could go sci-fi, sci-fact, techno, steam-punk, apocalyptic, retro-futuristic or utopian. Who knows what the future will bring?
If you’re struggling for ideas, you could try a FontStruct search, explore the Futuristic or Future Tags, or perhaps look at some of the curated Sets, such as “Techno”, or “Retro Computer”.
Competition Time Period
Friday, 10th April 2020 – Friday 1st May, 2020
Competition Rules
You must be a registered FontStruct user.
Your submission(s) must be posted and made “public” between 10th April 2020 and 1st May, 2020. 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 1st May, 2020 at 11pm PST. Additionally, your submission(s) must remain public at least until 8th May 2020 in order to give the judges enough time to review all qualifying entries.
Your submission(s) must be tagged with a “FutureComp” tag. (For fairness, during the competition time period, no FontStruction with the “FutureComp” tag will be awarded a Top Pick.)
Your submission(s) must be downloadable. If your FontStruction cannot be downloaded, the submission will not be including in the judging.
Your submission must be a newly published FontStruction. Simply adding the “FutureComp” tag to an already published font is not allowed.
For each submission, you must post at least one sample image in the comments of the FontStruction.
No letters in each submission can be MORE THAN 48 grid squares high.
FontStruct cloning is permitted but the judges will be looking for original work.
You may enter up to three FontStructions to the competition.
This is a friendly competition. Cheering, favoriting and fun banter is encouraged but cruel and uncivil behavior will not be tolerated.
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 between May 2nd and May 8th. Three prizewinners will be chosen. One of these will be the FontStructors’ Favourite. Winners will be announced in a FontStruct Blog post on Monday May 11th.
Prizes
Each winner can choose a t-shirt printed with a FontStruction glyph of their choice.
FontStructors’ Favourite
The valid entry with the greatest number of legitimate favourites at 11pm PST on 1st May 201820 will be one of the three prizewinners.
Questions?
If you have questions just add them as comments to this post.
Text from what some have called the first science-fiction novel – Lucian’s “True History”
FontStruct would like to heartily thank our principal sponsor: Glyphs .
Please remember that you can get 10% off the Glyphs desktop font editing software (OSX only) if you buy it from the FontStruct website. This is an exclusive offer and by taking it up, you will also help support the free FontStruct service.
From the very beginning, FontStruct has tried to be easy-to-use and avowedly non-technical for its font-designing users, but of course there is a great deal of technology behind our platform, and today we’re open-sourcing a small, but important part of it: the core of our font generation module.
There are several reasons for open-sourcing this code. It offers other developers an opportunity to contribute to the font-generation side of FontStruct. It also offers others a new tool to assist them in building their own font-generation tools.
But the main motivation for sharing the code is the desire to give something back – in the form of publicity and a software library – to an open-source project (Haxe) which has been extremely helpful to us in recent years.
By popular demand we’ve added four new bricks to the core brick pack today.
They are half-arc shapes in three thicknesses to match the existing arc or “macaroni” bricks, plus the so-called “pizza-slice” brick. Thanks to everyone who proposed and argued for these additions.
Unlike other bricks we decided to include only a single orientation, rather than the usual set of four rotated variants.
Another fun-packed competition is complete, leaving us to celebrate a wonderful assembly of diversely-inspired and inspiring entries.
As so often in previous competitions, there are simply too many high-quality entries to give each and every one the attention which they merit, so I’d like to congratulate all participants on their creativity and skill, and encourage everyone to have a long look at all the entries to discover those many gems which are not featured in this post.
– I don’t entirely see how nocturnal addresses the “counter” theme, but, nevertheless, it’s a beautiful, clean design from FontStruct’s master of filigree, Art Deco design: time.peace.
architaraz’s KD Spaceband meanwhile is perhaps the most original and usable entry of all, cleverly exploring and reinventing the spaces enclosed within its glyphs.
Connect 42 by jonrgrover represents all those competitors who chose to explore the gaming counter metaphor, and it’s a simple but playful entry.
– I profoundly love the tattered geometry of zcrapedium. So much so, that you’ll find it lurking in the background of every sample within this post. The variants in the upper case are a great idea, and I can think of plenty of real-world applications for this one.
Below it: the mysterious N8Lite – but who is nightpegasus, its designer? I have my suspicions. Whoever they are, they demonstrate a highly idiosyncratic and expectation-confounding style, of which N8Lite is a great example – rule-bound yes, but how strange and elusive are those rules!
Serifia la printe represents a larger group of excellent, more “classical”, filled-counter entries. “Serifia” contains many surprising, and indeed inconsistent, design choices, but therein lies the strength of its oddball character.
– All three of these entries would likely have fared very well in the Inline Competition.
fs psyline and KD Hachure are examples of sophisticated and mature FontStructing – ready to be moved on into the character-set expansion phase and suitable for all kinds of design applications.
Below them. the charming and ingeniously entitled Owl Circle by Waturu Aiso has a more mannered, fantastical look.
Last, but not least, in this short and selective tour, we have a group of three diverse entries, beginning with NAL’s Zirconia – its glyphs like the aerial view of an extra-terrestrial base, revealing its intricate, bevelled construction only at larger point sizes.
Geometrica B&L turns out to be barely legible, so it’s probably best suited to a logo or short headline, but the patterns of its semaphore-like, cuneiform patternings are wonderful nevertheless.
And finally, geneus1 offered us an array of exceptional contributions to this competition– all expertly-crafted, things of beauty. You really have to install G1 Recoil and start playing with it, in order to fully appreciate the richness of its ornate strudel. Definitely a recommended download.
The Winners:
“breach” by four is a standout winner and the “FontStructor’s favourite” for the “Counter” competition. An ingenious warping and rupturing of the boundaries between interior and exterior space, it’s a thought-provoking work of art in itself, and invites extended contemplation.
UPDATE: Some twitter users have pointed out a similarity between “breach” and the very beautiful commercial release “Clip” from Setup (previously Urtd). Personally I suspect and see coincidental inspiration rather than imitation, but please visit the Setup site and make the comparison for yourself.
O yes! This was love at first sight. Starbird by V.Sarela (Yautja) is a perfect example of what one might call “groovy deco”, and I can easily imagine it gracing the worn cover of some favourite ’70s sci-fi paperback. The contrast of the fine circle with the smooth and heavy fill beneath it is quite sumptuous.
Elmoyenique’s zykowarfare reminds me of plastic letter stencils – incorrectly yet playfully filled out perhaps, at the back of a classroom on a hot afternoon. There are scores of intriguing nuggety forms to discover in this one, hidden away amongst its self-interlocking glyphs .
Thanks!
That’s it! Congratulations to all our winners and everyone who took part!
Winners will be contacted regarding their prizes over the next few days. But right now, I have an inexplicable urge to go and remodel the kitchen …
Who says referendums are a threat to true democracy? In the perfect world of FontStruct, they work beautifully. Before we’ve even started, we have a winner!
The results of our recent Twitter poll:
What should be the theme of the next FontStruct competition?
Our theme is Counter: “the area of a letter that is entirely or partially enclosed by a letter form or a symbol (the counter-space/the hole of)” as wikipedia describes it.
What goes on within those little pools of nothingness inside your letters? Are they empty, or filled? Does their surface swallow all light, or shimmer or glow?
Of course you can choose any other sense of “Counter“ (arithmetical, political, military etc) if you wish. – You don’t have to pursue the typographic angle.
Your submission(s) must be posted and made “public” between 8th May 2018 and 1st June, 2018. 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 1st June, 2018 at 11pm PST. Additionally, your submission(s) must remain public at least until 10th June 2018 in order to give the judges enough time to review all qualifying entries.
Your submission(s) must be tagged with a “CounterComp” tag. (For fairness, during the competition time period, no FontStruction with the “CounterComp” tag will be awarded a Top Pick.)
Your submission(s) must be downloadable. If your FontStruction cannot be downloaded, the submission will not be including in the judging.
Your submission must be a newly published FontStruction. Simply adding the “CounterComp” tag to an already published font is not allowed.
For each submission, you must post at least one sample image in the comments of the FontStruction.
No letters in each submission can be MORE THAN 48 grid squares high.
FontStruct cloning is permitted but the judges will be looking for original work.
You may enter up to three FontStructions to the competition.
This is a friendly competition. Cheering, favoriting and fun banter is encouraged but cruel and uncivil behavior will not be tolerated.
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 between June 2nd and June 9th. Three prizewinners will be chosen. One of these will be the FontStructors’ Favourite. Winners will be announced in a FontStruct Blog post on Monday June 11th.
Prizes
Each winner can choose a t-shirt printed with a FontStruction glyph of their choice.
FontStructors’ Favourite
The valid entry with the greatest number of legitimate favourites at 11pm PST on 8th June 2018 will be one of the three prizewinners.
Questions?
If you have questions just add them as comments to this post.
