With work on Quinoa drawing to a close, I've allowed myself to indulge in a little side project that's been bumbling around in the back of my head for a while. It's a typeface made only from five elements: a square and four corners, used as components to build all glyphs. One could then use stylistic sets to swap out these elements to radically change the flavor of the typeface, or build in a number of variation axes along which one could hollow out, expand and contract, rotate and jiggle the elements for live visual effects (not implemented yet).
Here's what the first draft of the basic alphabet looks like:
And a few variations:
Actually, now that I see those last two examples, I'm tempted to make a spin-off typeface based on this piping principle that connects the free horizontal lines between letters wherever possible... hm...
Comments
Some characters were surprisingly easy to translate into this scheme (the tiny figures in particular!) whereas others remain a headache.
For instance, is the top /ø legible? The only two alternatives I came up with are the ones below, but they seem much more contrived.
Similarly, I'm having trouble with /ł. Does this work?
I don't think you need to squish the Œ œ Æ æ.
As for the conjoined letters, I agree that they are currently too narrow, but just placing the two full-sized letters next to each other defies the purpose of the ligatures. Of the following, I think I prefer the one with full-sized /o but reduced /e (second line).
I'm wondering whether that also works with Nordic expectations of /æ?
EDIT: It works even better if the pipes are extended so as to bridge the gaps to the blocks:
EDIT: Or with circular holes, maybe?
I like the circular holes variant which looks plaid!
BTW you might like to check out the work of Paul McNeil, and recently Just van Rossum.
This feels a bit like Conway's Life.
I actually still prefer the original, minimalist approach on the left. I'd be interested to hear the opinions of actual readers of ø on whether it parses (also in the block version).
Yes, the variable fonts aspect is supposed to be the core feature of this project, though if the idea of connecting letters in the pipe design works out as well as I hope, it could be a worthwhile spin-off on its own.
I'm getting the impression that maximizing the number of connections is not a desirable thing, though. The combination /u/n with three links becomes too monolithic. I'm thinking of connecting at the baseline and x-height only in those cases (middle row) or only in the bottom two levels (bottom row).
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/lettersoup/milka/
https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/lettersoup/milka/regular/glyphs.html
We had tremendous fun doing the Greek and the Cyrillic together
Milka looks like lots of fun indeed! And yes, I've had a thought or two about Cyrillic and Greek, but I had my doubts over whether the conceptual space would be flexible enough for those scripts, especially the many small-scale graphemic differences in the Cyrillic (e.g., between и and н). Not impossible though!
(I love the lepidoteran Ж, however! ;-)
Either Ελληνικά is spelled wrong, or I’m just not seeing some of those characters.
Yes, Ελληνικά was misspelt. I made some more Greek in the meantime:
https://fontstruct.com
Again, we should hope for a native speaker to weigh in.