Granite - a more contemporary garamond ?

So this is supposed to be similar to Garamonds but be more durable for bad paper and printing, and also be more legible on screen. Supports Latin and Cyrillic. Italic is in progress, and also please ignore all diacritics.
Weights: Thin, Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold, and ExtraBold. Light, Semibold, and Bold are interpolations (3 masters).
(Granite is a working name and may not be final)

Attached PDF contains (current) glyph set and sample texts.

Comments

  • Especially in the heavier weights, hood of /a/ looks a bit feeble, and /w/ feels like he's pulled his pants up too high. 
  • edited February 2017
    Ideally the descenders should be shorter than the ascenders.
  • What makes it Garamondish? To me it feels very strict and serious and solid, especially with these slab serifs. Not that it's something bad, but that's not Garamond.

    Speaking of cyrillics, /yeru-cy has a big gap between its two parts, /ze-cy and /e-cy need a serif. /El-cy is too narrow at the top in heavier weights. /be-cy is good in lighter weights, but needs a more complex ascender to survive emboldening. /em-cy could be a tiny bit wider in bolder weights. /de-cy and/ef-cy look surprisingly good.
  • we back!

    thank you craig hrant and samuil so much! it's been very helpful.

    Attached is a new proof, this time i put the information about it on the first page. Includes italic and roman diacritics. Hope you take a look :)
  • Italics:
    The bowl of /che-cy is too deep.
    /de-cy is again surprisingly good, but its perceived slant is somewhat different from the rest of the letters. It's a pain to get right, but it needs to lean a bit more to the right. Usually a small adjustment of the tail is enough.
    /she-cy and friends look good in medium and bold weights, but the final upswish of the pen looks forces and anemic in thin weights.
    /softsign-cy looks like /hardsign-cy in bolder weights. The initial stroke grows too much when emboldened.
    /yeru-cy has this gap again. Tighten it up just a little bit.
  • This is starting to take shape nicely. In particular, the Italics have a convincing rhythm and style. I feel like the Roman has some catching up to do in that respect, but it's difficult to pin down where exactly. For instance, the «other» here, especially the «ot» part, strikes me as significantly looser than the «riz» in «characterized». As for stylistic consistency, there appear to be two different design philosophies at work in the round shapes, with some (like /b/d/o) having broken strokes almost like a Blackletter whereas others (like /n/e/s) are completely smooth. I'm wondering whether sticking to a single design philosophy here wouldn't improve the overall consistency

    Other things:
    • The Roman /y strikes me as too narrow.
    • This may just be a matter of personal taste, but the Roman /a feels a bit bottom-heavy to me. I'd recommend lowering the bowl just a bit and giving more weight to the top terminal, perhaps extend it a bit more to the left as well.
    • Is the Hairline weight deliberately made to look a bit condensed?
    • I would recommend rethinking the /Œ.
    • Your /ẞ is a valid design per se, but its tight point strikes me as too busy compared with the more matter-of-factly shapes of your other glyphs. I would recommend compressing the structures on the right side of the glyph (not the glyph as a whole) to calm it down a bit. I really like the implementation in Germany's government typeface, BundesType:

    Cheers!
  • NCT Granite has also been released to MyFonts: http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/nct/granite/
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