Vuit Grotesk, a project to learn typeface design

Salvaggio Matthieu

Hello,

My name is Matthieu Salvaggio, I'm a graphic design student at the ESAD of Valence (France).
I've always been interested in Typeface design. Some months ago (January) I decided to give it a try, a real one (so far I had designed few glyphs for other fonts during internships or for some text infos on posters) so I decided to work on a lineal typeface. The overall concept is quite simple: I'm trying to design something clear, a real useful reading tool for long texts.

Now, I know I'm a novice in this field, I've been looking at other kind of lineal typefaces, how they are built and shaped and I inspired myself from those (mostly grotesk typefaces such as Atlas, Akzidenz, etc.), adding some other elements to the glyphs in order to make it more "readable". I've tried to add as few details as I could as I want it to be really simple and I've grown up to be fed up with grotesque typefaces with so many details on them I end up looking more at the details of the glyphs than reading the text. The few details I allowed myself to have some fun with are the ones you can find on the /t/, the /l/ as I found some lineal fonts might be tricky to read concerning the /I/ and /l/ designs (even though there are differences).
As I said I'm a novice, this is more of an excercise for me to learn how to build a typeface and learn a bit about font development/font softwares (fontlab/glyphs). So I know it will need a lot of work before it is a correct, professional type.

If you please you can totally ignore the cyrillic glyphs shown in the image attached as they need an *immense* amount of work and I'll focus on them after I'm done with the Latin/Latin extended

So I'm really eager to hear your advices and comments on how to improve it. I'm really excited about continuing this project to its fulfilment 

Thanks in advance for reading this.

Matthieu

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

First things first: the ascenders should be taller than the caps, and longer than the descenders.

Belleve Invis

/J looks to narrow

Ray Larabie

Go back to those Cyrillics and compare with samples of Cyrillic text. There's too much wrong with it to make a list. You can't rush through that stuff. Believe me, I know.

You've added a lot of historic and deprecated glyphs. As a novice, you may want to consider reducing your glyph set. You have to decide which languages you want to support since you can't support them all. But don't just go by the Unicode ranges. Many ranges are scattered with deprecated and historical glyphs. If you load my recent Gymkhana Book font and look at the Cyrillic areas, you can see which glyphs I skipped over. I'm not saying you should never include historical glyphs, but it might be overambitious for a beginner. Don't use my Cyrillic glyphs designs as a design guide. I'm not 100% confident that they're correct. 

For accents, this is a good place to start. 
http://diacritics.typo.cz/

I like your idea for the lowercase i accents. I'm not sure if readers will like it, but I think it's clever.

Πis fun to mess around with but make sure you test it in words and make sure it feel okay. That OE is crafty but maybe too extreme for such a conservative typeface.

I can see you're trying to keep your under accents (comma accent, cedilla) really tight. But you've taken that idea too far. Give them some presence.

Ascenders don't necessarily have to be higher than the cap height. They can even be lower than the caps. As long as you're conscious of the relationship between the ascenders and descenders. If you type words with ascenders and descenders and you're okay with the balance, go for it.

Your lowercase y feels too big.

Christian Thalmann

I'm probably not the right person to comment on the æsthetics, since I'm not a fan of grotesques in general... however, from the technical side:

If you're aiming at small text sizes in particular, as your poster says, you'd probably profit from leaning more to humanist proportions (taller ascenders, more open apertures).

The rhythm still feels rather bumpy in running text; I would recommend going over the spacing again.

The /r is too narrow, whereas the /u strikes me as somewhat on the wide side.

Your punctuation (.,;:) and math symbols are much too small.

Curve quality in general needs improvement. Check out the bottom of /six for a particularly bad offender.

As Ray says, the Cyrillic is a total mess.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Instinct is very important, but it's formed in large part by experience, and as a novice especially you can't necessarily look at words and feel the right balance, because there are things going on underneath that you need to consciously think about. In the case of vertical proportions, you can easily be fooled into thinking that the descenders actually need more room than the ascenders; but there's a reason virtually all good text fonts go the opposite way: descenders are far less frequent than ascenders, and space is a valuable commodity; you are wasting it by giving too much room to an underused vertical area. Of course there are always exceptions. But I don't see why this would be one.

Good text fonts also tend to have caps shorter than ascenders, because otherwise acronyms overwhelm and distract. That said, since this design is a grot, and has a large x-height it might be OK to make the caps as tall as the ascenders. But if so I would make the caps relatively narrower... which might be a greater evil than not aligning things so much.

Ray's comments on the Cyrillic are valuable.

Salvaggio Matthieu

Hello everyone

Thank you all for the replies ! It is much appreciated. I've had quite a crazy schedule lately and I was waiting for several feedbacks to get back at it, I'm quite excited now, plenty of things to redraw/remove.

I'll keep you updated with it as soon as I've changed/improved the font.

Thanks again

Łukasz Józef

Hello, here is a little info on how You can improve same of the Polish letters:
Ł shouldn't and ł can't have a completely horizontal bar ( ł can have such a bar only at the far top of the letter l but it's rather written and not common )
ą ogonek can't be placed in the middle of the letter,
Ćć and Śś diacritics can be probably moved a bit right.
Good luck with with Vuit

Samuil Simonov

The Cyrillics definitely need a lot of work, I don't even know where to start, other than recommending to delete most of them completely and to start anew. I am still writing my guide to Cyrillic letterforms, I guess you will find it very useful.