Andreas Stötzner

Those of you who fancy old commercial neon signs in the city may enjoy watching this theme galery.
The majority of these advertisements have vanished, however, a few survived and have even been faithfully restored.

Hard to measure all typefaces with one rule. A brilliant text face is difficult to compare to an excellent display face.
Features and range of weights are much overrated, i.m.h.o., whereas drawing and spacing are far too often underestimated by fontists.
Idea and concept I would rather leave aside here because that you can’t measure objectively.

I would distinguish essential requirements from extras and individual aspects.

1. Essentials
• Quality of glyph outlines (drawing)
• Quality of spacing (width and sidebearings)
• Quality of kerning
• Character coverage

2. Extras
• Font family concept (Italics, weights, widths, others)
• Languages supported (apart from the usual suspects)
• Figure sets and fractions
• Ligatures
• Variant glyphs and alternate sets
• symbols and ornaments

In my opinion, a basically well crafted single font with 400 glyphs and no feature extras is worth more than a feature- and alternates-packed superfont of 2000 glyphs which are lousily drawn and poorly spaced.

The aspect of character coverage is an interesting one. It always evokes a ‘search for completeness’ but in practice this is hardly to achieve. Who is going to tell you what goes in and what does not? Nobody. Out there is no reliable common standard which tells you that. Even well-known references (e.g. the Adobe glyph sets) are not entirely reliable in that respect.

Nick Shinn said:

… So if one’s design is an obvious pastiche, why not use this olde pseudo-ligature?

OK, if you want it to go down that particular path, that may be a way to do it. But are you sure, if that typeface gets used somewhere remote, by someone, for something, the recipient will detect your sense of quaint humorism?

My advise (for those who care): 1. go for the Dresden form in the 1st place if you want to be on the safe side. 2. go for the Frankfurt form if you’re sure it suits the specific typographic environment. 3. Venture for the Leipzig or Zehlendorf form only after hard thinking and if you’re absolutely sure you know what you are doing.

I should mention that a few days ago, the entire publication Signa Nº 9 – Das große Eszett – has been made publicly available under CC-licence. I hope it furthers insight on the matter, even though it’ll be not everyone’s cup of tea to read German.

https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/07/13/signa-9-ausgabe-2017-cc/signa-9-ausgabe-2017-cc.pdf

@ChristopherBergmann: I wonder why Andron is the only typeface in the list lacking any stars at all. Is it that bad? ‘More styles’ missing is also not true. – You send me straight down into a final depression…