"Lineal" Neo-grotesque

Wolf Böse

Hey folks,
I just registered to the message board,
I am selftaught and have been designing type for about 5 years, recently started a new project "lineal"

obviously nothing shockingly new here,
but i do like exploring the familiar and see what can be changed,
what are the things i dislike in previous/existing designs, what are the problems and how are they solved.

i would like to get some feedback on what i have here so far.

i have 3 masters at this point, i began with the "regular" did a quick light version, and then did a extrapolation to get a bold that i adjusted just a little so far. so the bold shows more flaws than the other weights. i find that the thinner lineweights often hide errors in lineweight consistancies, obviously the extrapolation brings out that messiness…

as far as origin goes, i suppose we are looking at helvetica, akzidenz grotesque, san francisco and the likes.
i have designed several sans serifs before but avoided this particular design space so far.

you can argue its originality. but im curious what my interpretation turns out to be.

Craig Eliason

Looks very competent to my eyes. /f/ and /t/ look a bit dark in the darker weights; maybe the crossbar should be thinned. /z/ might be too wide in the bold? It also looks to me like /g/ gets clogged-looking at the joins--does it have less thinning than the other bowl-and-stick letters?

Wolf Böse

hi craig, thanks for your thoughts, its true the bolder weight is mostly a dirty extrapolation from the light and regular. i did some cleanups here and there but the contrast changed slightly and i thihnk the horizontals became slightly to thick. 

so thats where that comes from (t & f, etc)

the g doesnt have special treatment at this point.

Wolf Böse

hthis is the first draft of numbers…

Jasper de Waard

Some things I'm seeing:

The bowls of 6 and 9  appear larger in the light than they do in the bold.

The difference between the size of the upper bowl and the lower bowl of 8 looks larger in the bold than in the regular.

The 5 (especially the top), looks narrower in the bold than in the regular. 

The 1 looks wider in the bold than in the regular. I know it's not, but it looks this way because a bold has inherently less whitespace between glyphs, making the whitespace let of 1 stand out more.

The top of 3, or maybe the entire three in the light could be wider. 

The 4 looks wider in the light than in the bold.

The way the strokes in 6 and 9 are 'cut off' in the bold looks a bit uneasy compared to the light.

I think the overall proportions are really good in the regular, but a little off in the light and the bold, in opposite ways. 

Good luck!

Nick Shinn

Start out with the tabular figures first, and make them the same width for as many weights as possible. Try to make “MORRIS 1100” look as good as possible.

This will make things easier down the road.

Thomas Phinney

The underbite on the 3 and 9, and overbite on the 6, seem subtle in the light but perhaps a bit much in the bold. You might want to dial back that difference in the bold?

Philip Jackson

The 9 and 6 look like they lean to the left slightly. An adjustment demonstated in the crudely adjusted 1 would look nice if the circled parts go in a little to not look pasted in.

Robin Mientjes

This is not a very specific critique, but I think the overshoots are not really there. Maybe they’re too light. Viewing from a distance I am seeing a lot of bounce in the lines. So perhaps the vertical proportions could use some tooling.