need some critics for my first font

Serkan Ulukut

Hey there, hello everyone. I'm a graphic designer for almost 10 years and i'm just starting to realize that font design may be my cup of tea as i enjoy it too much and keep coming with the new ideas. When i say new of course i may not know if someone else somewhere else could have executed similar ideas. Here is my font that i send to myfonts and rejected.

They said nothing about the rejection and i really wonder what may have been wrong with this font. Any ideas? If you need more of examples or need to see in a different way i'd love to share. İ already made this as a ttf font file and all the kernings. Total 170 glyps.
I will also have more questions about how to licence this font and how to make a font universally accepted. Thanks in advance.

Robin Mientjes

This should be in the Type Design Critiques category, but until it’s moved there, let’s start at the beginning.

Have you studied any typefaces before starting this? There are quite a few sites out there that can give you a quick overview of the sort of things you need to learn about. Briem’s site comes to mind.

Your sample doesn’t show the character set very well, but it does reveal why MyFonts may have chosen not to publish this. Your letters are sloppy and look like a quick magic marker job. Is this intentional? What are you trying to achieve here?

It’s up to you to make this work and to convince others of what you intend to do. Right now, it’s a mess.

Serkan Ulukut

Thank you for your comment Rob. Well you are right about my sample. Maybe I should renew this.
To say the truth i thought i have studied enough before starting this. For the set i go for unicode ucs-2. But i didn't make a chart for all the glyps.
I did this design intentionally sloppy. It's for kids' designs. Maybe for a story book or a cartoon. But it's definately not a quick marker job. I draw all of the letters by following some rules. All the stems are used the same path seperately at small letters and caps. All the x heights, cap heights, ascenders and descenders are set, of course except for the rounded letters. They are slightly higher. But there's some other exceptions to that. Some letters are higher than others as a matter of fact that they don't have straight endings. But it's very small difference like a few pixels.
Actually i made some real effort here to achieve a "readable" sloppy look. On the other hand if you look closer it's fluent. At least that's my opinion. I even worked on contrast transitions.

Mark Simonson

I'm not going to go into details, but would like to make an observation that I hope you will find helpful and not take the wrong way:

Novices (and I think it's safe to say you are a novice at this) are not in a very good position to judge the quality of their own work precisely because they are novices. In fact, novices tend to think their work is pretty good when it usually isn't. Pay attention to the advice of those who are more experienced. You will get better with practice and study. The way to tell you're getting good is when you look at your work and think it sucks.

George Thomas

Why not reach out to one or more of the individuals in Turkey listed at this link and ask them for some hands-on advice? Some of them are likely more than willing to help.  http://luc.devroye.org/turkish.html

Dave Crossland

Serkan Ulukut said:

I did this design intentionally sloppy. It's for kids' designs. Maybe for a story book or a cartoon. But it's definately not a quick marker job. I draw all of the letters by following some rules. 

I think you are on the path to a great typeface! Don't be discouraged by critiques from people with more experience!  

It sort of reminds me of that old Calvin and Hobbes cover lettering:


However, if you compare that with yours, you can see that in yours, the caps are like a bold weight version compared to the lowercase, whereas in the book cover, the caps and lowercase letters have their same weight. I think that is the biggest issue you have. 

There are some particular things - the dot of the i is too low, the 'r' is not just a chopped off 'n' but starts lower and arches in its own way that is much narrower than what you have, the f has fallen down off the baseline - that make the type especially uncomfortable to read and you can adjust them without compromising your 'kids cartoon' intention. 

My suggestion is to fix up those things and study similar typefaces (there are a few from Font Diner in the Google Fonts catalog and around, http://omnibus-type.com/fonts/bahiana.php is more 'paper cut' but is in some ways similar) but then pause this project and aim to do something much more traditional and classic, like a Garamond. You'll have your hands full with just the 8 letters in  'adhesion', and you can make sample text with your 8 letter font using www.adhesiontext.com 

With this you'll learn a lot about how your own mind has recorded the Latin script's archetypical shapes, and how that is different to the actual shapes as you draw them... and you'll be able to tell apart which rules are more important than others. I think conceptually that's your biggest issue; you know a little, more than a total beginner, but not enough to make something other people would want to use

Stay the path, you'll get there!!

Serkan Ulukut

Of course i respect those who are experienced. I'm just trying to figure out in what way it is bad. I wasn't trying to brag with my work. I said "i think contrasts have a fluent transmission" you can say "actually it is not. because....". I said i worked hard for that transmission happen. you may say "if you want to achieve that look you can try this and that etc.." so it would be helpful to me and i can be sure that you also see what i was trying to achieve with this design. i mean is it my perception of what is good and what is bad about any design or my lack of knowledge with fonts? In other words, do you think it can become acceptable with more work (i.e. making stems straight, working on kernings a little more etc.) or it is just garbage and i should design completely a new font?

And when i make a new font, what aspects i should correct?

Thanks in advance.

Serkan Ulukut

Thank you George Thomas. I will try to contact them. Maybe it's my lack of terminology.

Serkan Ulukut

Thank you very much Dave Crossland. You can't imagine how helpful this was to me and also got my motivation back. Actually at first when i was making the capitals i made a desicion and it turns out a wrong one In the process of creating this I first thought that small letters and caps would be used for different aims. Like 2 different fonts; 1 capital, 1 small. But then i wasn't sure but did it that way anyways. Maybe i can add that weight later as a different family member - bold.

And about that n and r, i'm suprised how did i missed that lol. I will indeed check all the letters for that issue. For f letter i somehow was thinking this was the right usage. I checked with other types and see what you mean about how Latin script shapes are different from the ones in my head. Thanks for the insight. Very appreciated.

Thomas Phinney

Hi Serkan,

I think the biggest thing you could do to improve your font would be to work on the spacing. It is too tight, and that makes it impossible to make it very consistent.

It happens that I have a video tutorial on YouTube on this very topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbc_O7bNROs

Because your shapes are more irregular and your straight sides are not always perfectly vertical, the advice in the video will not apply perfectly. If you have a just-slightly slanted letter like your “i” then you should probably use the middle of the stem as the point to measure the sidebearing from.

George Thomas

Serkan, if you would like to receive them I have notes on establishing spacing that would be useful to you, in PDF format. If so, email me; my email is in my profile.

Dave Crossland

George Thomas said:

Serkan, if you would like to receive them I have notes on establishing spacing that would be useful to you, in PDF format. If so, email me; my email is in my profile.

Why not publish them?  

Serkan Ulukut

Sorry guys for my late answer. I had to study a little before i reply Thank you Thomas Phinney. I watched the video, i got the headlines but a little confused about how to apply some of the rules to my font. When you show it, it makes sense but when i apply it to my font, it's too much space. (you see my counters are wide - so the spacing should also be wide) I do agree that my spacing is too tight, now. I achieved that with kerning. (guess i took the long -and wrong- way hehe.) Closer letters helped me to make the kerning equal mathematicly. Altough that i agree my spacing is too tight, there must be another rule to apply for instances like mine. I think i won't increase it too much. 80-100 points max for each letter's both side in total. What do you think? One thing i realize though i made it all mathemathical and ignored the black & white balance. So maybe i will have to be doing kerning again after spacing. Big pain
At this point, before i start working George Thomas yes i would love to recieve that PDF file I will send an e-mail to you.

Ray Larabie

Don't be precious with your kerning and spacing. I don't even think twice about clearing kerning and resetting all my sidebearings. Just pull the trigger and start over; it's easier than trying to salvage bad spacing. Try this kind of rhythm for your n and build everything off that.

   

Michael Vokits

Ray Larabie said:

Don't be precious with your kerning and spacing. I don't even think twice about clearing kerning and resetting all my sidebearings. Just pull the trigger and start over; it's easier than trying to salvage bad spacing.

+1. Sooo much less work in the end, and much better results.

Joshua Lurie-Terrell

Hi there. I'm a member of the MyFonts review board, and I can tell you the things I noted when I reviewed your face. I cannot speak for the entire board or its members, though – just for myself.

• As others have said, your spacing is inconsistent and lacks any sort of optical correction.
• The inconsistency in stroke weight is not appealing. In a handwriting face like this, one would expect stroke to be much more consistent, given that the intention is (or seems to be) the emulation of handwriting with a fixed-width pen.
• There are lots of little things you can do to increase the internal harmony and color of the face – more carefully-considered overshoots and character widths, better kerning, etc.
• Intentionally naïve handwritten faces are a dime a dozen; we have several dozen, actually, at MyFonts. Those that are successful in terms of sales have something special that helps us market them, and which makes them most useful to end-users: multiple scripts (some include Cyrillic and/or Greek, at least), or excellent glyph substitution, ligatures that make the face look more like handwritten text, alternates, multiple sets of figures, small caps, symbols and/or other features.

This is my off-the-top-of-my-head remembrance, so take it with a big giant grain of salt.

I think you're on your way toward learning about the intricacies of type design. I love your enthusiasm and hope you continue to experiment with letter forms; we do look forward to seeing your work again once you've grown and matured as a letterer and type designer. -Joshua

peggo (Pedro González)

Before continue spend your energy and may be avoid you a little frustration if don't have the results that you are searching, I highly recommend you to read MyFonts guides https://foundry.myfonts.com/guides/ which are so useful and clear at every point needed to produce good fonts and sell it at the end...

the best,
Pedro