Hello everyone,
I have for a few years now off and on been working on this serif font named Catherine (named after my daughter, Lily Catherine) and I recently have had the ability to devote some more regular time to type design. I found this website while researching a different project (more on that in the future) and I am hoping to get some honest assessments of what you all think about this.
My goal is that it will be used in books and text in general, so print and digital. As the image below says, it will have five weight when it is done and italics for each weight.
What do you all think about the design? How can I make it better, what am I doing right so far? I have used Illustrator to create the basic forms and then imported all of the vectors into TypeTool 3.1.
Comments
I don't have a question mark yet. I have found it difficult to settle on a design. Thank you for the critique. I keep going back and forth on the spacing but hearing from someone else that it is too tight is good to you.
As for the accents: are there rules somewhere that would be helpful for me to read to get a better handle on accents?
Here's a useful exercise for any budding typeface designer: take the letter shapes you've created, and manipulate them to fit the widths and spacing of one or more of the classic typefaces. This is a great way to understand relative proportion and spacing, and also a good insight into the ways in which these remain quite similar — with exceptions for some letters — despite differences in style, stroke modulation, weight, etc.
I agree with others that a and g draw too much attention when compared with the rest of the glyphs. It is not wrong to explore odd or interesting shapes, but consistency is key. Rule of thumb is that characters follow a common construction logic in their group — rounds, verticals, diagonals — and you want to harmonize within and between those groups for even text appearance.
Most important, keep at it