Show me your failures!

Last night I watched Nina Stössinger's TypoBerlin 2012 talk "The Importance of Being Ernestine". The best part for me as a new designer was when she talked about her early efforts in type design and "the ugliest ampersand in the history of the world":



It was supremely encouraging to be reminded that we all start in pretty much the same place but it is possible, with patience and determination, to get from there to excellence.

So, I've got to ask - does anyone else feel brave enough to show us their embarrassing failures? In my day job I'm convinced we learn better by looking at things that didn't work and asking why not, rather than looking at things that did work and asking why; I'm sure the same is true here.

Comments

  • Fist off, here's an ASCII from early 2014:


    This is a project from 2015/2016 that wouldn't have been quite as bad if I hadn't set nearly all the RSB and LFT to 30  :# I really needed to learn how to space things. This is my second try at Cyrillic. And I started Cherokee syllabics? I have questions for my past self.




    Finally, a transitional font I made with spacing equally as bad as the previous example, in addition to almost no optical corrections:



    I recently went about redrawing this^ which now looks like this:

    Feels good to improve  :)  #glowup
  • My embarrassing mistakes are too many to list, but this one comes close to being the worst. FontCreator's Preview toolbar using a Windows control that does not support colour, and most apps don't yet support colour fonts either, but that's not the problem.

    I designed my multi-coloured glyphs primarily for use on the Web, but they should at least work in monochrome. After a recent update to "fix" problems with intersecting contours I managed to break the monochrome version. I am still too busy to fix it properly. Reverting to an earlier version would lose too many other fixes.

    Top is how it should look in monochrome:


    Bottom is how it actually looks in colour and monochrome:
    The colour versions is still fine, and works in Web Browsers, but the Stylistic Alternates cannot be used in print applications that don't support coloured font technology.

  • Cool stuff Jens! (One day I'll have to somehow dig up my own C64 stuff...)

    BTW, I also had a "winter", of about seven years.
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