I think this is my rite-of-passage grotesque sans. I started it on a holiday; I discovered that in one of Australia's iconic surf locations, the design aesthetic had moved away from rough graffiti-like lettering I expected and towards a more precise, squarish regular monoline. So I tried drawing one; the expected use would be for display, ideally at large sizes.
I started with a squirclar /o, offset a bunch of open paths, and went from there. Because it's basically an offset monoline (I have made the bold a bit more contrasty), I felt a bit comfortable trying a range of weights. More in the attached PDFs. Numbers are sucking but I'm not sure why, but I think I'm more or less happy with everything else.
Any comments gratefully received - thanks!
Comments
The only awkwardness I'm feeling is to do with the height of the double stories in the /g/ and the /y/, the descenders currently look too long and gangly. I would try to pull them up so these letterforms are more compact - a bit like the /g/ in the slab serif at the bottom of this image:
I would also try to bring a bit of individual character to each letterform more. I see you've started off with the squircle which is a nice shape in itself, but it does look very dominant throughout the text. But I'm sure in time you'll find the voice within the design and start bringing in more idiosyncrasies / personality traits to each letter.
Also, it looks like the counters of /a/e are less balanced in the Bold than in the Regular, especially the /e. Try moving the crossbar up a bit.
I agree that the descenders are too deep.
I thought I had a system to the terminals, and I thought maybe I was being too rigid! Maybe it's not an appropriate idea, but there was an idea to the construction:
So in my mind the only one that doesn't fit is /a, because it looked weird when I applied it.
I'm also reminded of how typefaces like Eurostile treat the descender of /g/, it's almost a quarter the height of the bowl:
Why is the o such more narrow than a, e, s? The curve quality looks pretty bad in a lot of places, too: the middle section of the /s seems to not even try to cleanly merge into the curves below and above, the bottom left curve of /t is weirdly shaped, etc.
You overall don’t seem to have decided what kind of curves you want your typeface to have. I for example don’t see much of a connection between the bottom of the g and the /o design that the top uses. Same goes for the /a, too. And I would never start with so many characters /weights before you have even a few uppercase letter to clarify the overall structure of the typeface. Try to clarify your design intentions in one weight, with both upper- and lowercase characters, and only once you’re clear on that, expand to more characters and weights.
Sorry if this seems harsh, but I think as of yet this is not anywhere near a design that should be released. Keep working!
Up close, your curves are often very wobbly; they will need more work.
The 'g' and 'y' descenders seem shorter, but the ascenders and 'p' descenders are still very long.
Tip of t is a little bit too short.
Tittles are too small.
'9' is too stiff in the spine.
- Your stroke seems to be intended to look monolinear, but it doesn't. Check out the too-heavy top of /p's bowl or the too-light right stroke of /v. Sometimes the thickness of your stroke also fluctuates as it goes a round a bend.
- I agree with Ori's and Craig's calls for thinned joins. It looks like you've experimented with that in /p, but it doesn't work well there. It's too abrupt; try extending the thinning over a larger distance (maybe even from the bowl's top and bottom extrema).
- Your arches (as in /n) and connected bowls (as in /p) try hard to be symmetric, but in doing that they end up looking unbalanced. Try moving the apices of the arches and bowls away from the vertical stem to give the joins more air and the opposite sides more stability to compete with the vertical stem.
- Your /a is still much too wide. In the heavier weights, the same goes for /s.
- Curve quality is still a big problem. The /s seems to suffer from multiple fractions, for example.
For illustration purposes, I took the liberty of redrawing your /a in Glyphs, smoothing out the curves, thinning the join, and shifting the bottom apex:I just want to check I am understanding the critique and how to apply it. If so I'll go through and check all the glyphs.
I learnt how to check smooth thickness transitions around corners. It's supposed to be basically monoline but I was advised to add a tiny bit of contrast so I've gone for 20 units horizontal stem, 22 units vertical stem.
2. I think you've started thinning the bowl too soon, which contributes to the impression of imbalance. I'd have it starting to thin only after the "corners".
3. The segment where the vertical stem and the bowl coincide looks too wide, in my opinion. The interior of the bowl should probably eat a little into the vertical stem.
My suggestion of starting the thinning at the vertical extrema appears to have been a bad idea — sorry. It works well for round characters, but I guess superellipses have their own logic.
How are we looking now?
I think it's definitely progressing in the right direction but I wonder if a couple of the letterforms could do with some finessing - for instance the curved tail of the /g seems at odds with the curve of the bowl above it. Perhaps take a look at at Eurostile to see how this is resolved:
Also there seems to be too many similar shapes across the board and I wonder if some subtle widening / narrowing of certain round forms could help. Nothing too dramatic of course, but just enough so that the eye isn't distracted by the big counters in the design.
Again going back to Eurostile, you can see that the bowl of the /g is just a tad narrower than similar letterforms. There's also a bit of tapering where the bowl meets the stem, to take some of the weight out of these joins.
It's coming along nicely though overall.
The stroke consistency and thinning in the Light look pretty good to me at first sight. I still think the top right quadrant of /a is too heavy, but it seems to be an exception. Moving to the heavier weights, though, the strokes become so monolinear as to look crude. You're going to need more thinning and optical compensation there.
I would suggest working only on a single master until the skeleton is perfect and only then worry the weight spectrum, though. There is still a lot of work to do on the skeleton.
First of all, I'm still having trouble getting a comfortable reading rhythm going due to imbalanced character widths. I'm surprised that Chris suggested some subtle widening and narrowing to avoid repeating elements — I would in fact propose some not-so-subtle adjustments to many glyphs to render them more visually harmonious with the rest. For instance, the /n and /u seem dramatically too wide to me, whereas the /y's narrower bowl conforms to the typeface's conventions much more readily. The /a remains a bit too wide as well. I would recommend choosing a reference glyph (maybe /o or /e) and harmonizing the other letters in strings like «ooooonooooonnnnnooooo». The capitals, on the other hand, strike me as surprisingly narrow compared to the exuberant stride of the lowercase.
Curves: Still room for improvement. The apex of /n and related arches looks bunched up toward the stem to my eyes, whereas I would expect the opposite movement. This also goes for the bottom of /a in the Bold. The /B is very ungainly, and the /s is a train wreck (at least in the Light). The numerals /2/5 suffer from both bad curves and blobby stroke width.
Shapes: I really like your Light /e, but it acquires an overbite in the Bold. The counters of /a/e need balancing in the Bold. Some of the punctuation is incredibly dainty and could use a factor of two of magnification, especially the weirdly hovering colon. The semicolon is vertically misaligned. The guillemets, on the other hand, could be relaxed a little, they're very aggressive right now. The /ð needs work (see link below).
http://66.147.242.192/~operinan/2/2.11/2.1.4.eth.htm
@Christian Thalmann you definitely hit the nail on the head with that observation. Those letterforms you reference do need a lot more narrowing and widening.
The stroke width has become a bit less consistent in the process though (generally a bit heavier, but the bottom left is thin). I also have the impression that the bottom is not sitting flat on the baseline, but is sloping slightly to the left. Perhaps compare to the bottom of /o?
Judging from the low-res picture, I'd say the /n and /u are still too wide in the heavier weights, and the Bold especially would profit from some optical corrections. The /a and /e are very dense, for instance, and stem/bowl junctions tend to clump together.