Show me your failures!

Simon Cozens

Last night I watched Nina Stössinger's TypoBerlin 2012 talk "The Importance of Being Ernestine". The best part for me as a new designer was when she talked about her early efforts in type design and "the ugliest ampersand in the history of the world":



It was supremely encouraging to be reminded that we all start in pretty much the same place but it is possible, with patience and determination, to get from there to excellence.

So, I've got to ask - does anyone else feel brave enough to show us their embarrassing failures? In my day job I'm convinced we learn better by looking at things that didn't work and asking why not, rather than looking at things that did work and asking why; I'm sure the same is true here.

Ray Larabie

Here's a mistake called Retsyn that I released in 1995 or 1996.

Mark Simonson

Here are a couple of my early attempts at type design (way before I could do it on my own computer).

The first is from 1976, when I was in college. An assignment in Lettering II, drawn in ink on a full-sized sheet of illustration board (letters about 3" tall). This assignment was when I first became interested in doing type design. I guess this wasn't a failure exactly (I got an A), but I think it has a lot of problems as a type design.



The second is from 1978. This was my one and only submission to ITC (understandably rejected). The letters were drawn 4" tall with marker, photographed and made into rub-down type for the sample setting shown here. I didn't consider it to be a finished design, but a raw idea that I assumed the folks a ITC would guide me in finishing. I had no idea how little I knew about type design when I undertook this, but by the end I was starting to get a clue.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Indeed there's no better teacher than being wrong in public.

My first fonts were on 8×8 bitmaps, which means they couldn't be very good or very bad. But my first outline font had plenty of leeway to be decidedly bad:

Predictably, it was a revival of the most classical Armenian typeface, but since I didn't have a scanner I eyeballed it. I was so proud of that insignificant and contrived difference in finish in the descenders, while being blind to how bad my largest curves were...

Nathan Zimet

Fist off, here's an ASCII from early 2014:


This is a project from 2015/2016 that wouldn't have been quite as bad if I hadn't set nearly all the RSB and LFT to 30   I really needed to learn how to space things. This is my second try at Cyrillic. And I started Cherokee syllabics? I have questions for my past self.




Finally, a transitional font I made with spacing equally as bad as the previous example, in addition to almost no optical corrections:



I recently went about redrawing this^ which now looks like this:

Feels good to improve   #glowup

Craig Eliason

Here's a slide from a talk I gave about the iterative process of ironing out the ugliness in my Ambicase project. It shows a very early stage compared to the final shape of the Fatface version. 

Thomas Phinney

My very first font was this attempt at cross-breeding Gill Sans and Optima. It sort of worked, except the dreadful cap M. I knew the M was awful but didn't know what to do about it.


ooh, and that s! I fixed the cap S at some point, but the lowercase is still bad, getting thinner in the middle.

Bhikkhu Pesala

My embarrassing mistakes are too many to list, but this one comes close to being the worst. FontCreator's Preview toolbar using a Windows control that does not support colour, and most apps don't yet support colour fonts either, but that's not the problem.

I designed my multi-coloured glyphs primarily for use on the Web, but they should at least work in monochrome. After a recent update to "fix" problems with intersecting contours I managed to break the monochrome version. I am still too busy to fix it properly. Reverting to an earlier version would lose too many other fixes.

Top is how it should look in monochrome:


Bottom is how it actually looks in colour and monochrome:
The colour versions is still fine, and works in Web Browsers, but the Stylistic Alternates cannot be used in print applications that don't support coloured font technology.

Jens Kutilek

Gotta love how I didn't even bother to finish the lowercase alphabet there ...


After that I took a break until 2007, when my interest in type design was getting serious. Not that my first attempts in 2007 were much better than those ...

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Cool stuff Jens! (One day I'll have to somehow dig up my own C64 stuff...)

BTW, I also had a "winter", of about seven years.

Beau Williamson

When I started my first text font, I just wanted to pay attention to the technical side of the work, so I purposefully made the outlines very ugly. My idea was to learn about character sets and open type without getting bogged down in the details.

In the end, I did notice that it actually shone at very small sizes. I did so many legibility tests, blurring the output and correcting for ambiguity, that it remains readable down to about 3pt. Not so much for screen, but a good xerox output was sharply readable.



So, I've done better since then. But you can't say it's not original.