Munson, a Victorian style slab serif

Kent Lew

It is the serifs on the stem of italic ж that are mostly making it look odd, I think. Also, proportions of the two bowls look off to me. I think they should be slightly narrower, plus more separation in the middle. All those counter spaces should be more balanced.

I agree that the form of italic г looks out of place, both in terms of ball terminals and overall conformation.

But I, too, will defer to native users and leave them to comment on other things that I suspect could be improved.

Paul Miller

Yes they do look better without the serifs.  The side parts are a lower case c but they have had their bowls squashed horizontally by a fair amount.

Christian Thalmann

Maybe try a connection similar to cursive /i in the middle of /ж, rather than a geometric cross? The /ю shouldn't have Roman serifs either.

The /г/д/ч look weird to me.

Paul Miller

OK so I have altered the ч character and performed an Orchiectomy on the ghe (U+0433) character.  Putting a cursive i in the middle of the ж didn't look very good because of the long tails at each end so I think I will leave it as it is.

Christian, what is wrong with the д and do you mean the italic one or the roman one ?

André G. Isaak

The ghe is definitely improved. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the zhe though. At this point, though, I'd probably wait on input from Russian/Ukrainian/Belarussian/etc. speakers before committing to any changes.

André

Paul Miller

There are indeed other things I can be getting on with.  The fractions open type feature is implemented for Roman and Italic but is not implemented for the Bold and Bold Italic.

It should be a cut and paste job but it never goes that smoothly.  Besides I feel like taking a break.

Thomas Phinney

To me, there is a much increased variation in boldness between glyphs in the italic, compared to the upright.There are some surprisingly inconsistent and sometimes overly-heavy crossbars, notably but not only in ж. The italic be seems weak, particularly the flag.

Christian Thalmann

Paul, I mean the italic д. Its ascender is way too timid.

What's with the bent stems in н and ь?

The ф and м strike me as too heavy.

Samuil Simonov

Romans first:

I don't quite like the legs of ЖжКк, they are hard to get right.
Ф looks malnourished, its bowl should be bigger (not Bulgarian big, but bigger).
Мм are a bit too dark.
Зз could be a trifle wider.

Italics:

I agree with Christian, the tail of д looks like it was docked. Next to the flourish over б it looks especially short.
The vertical axis of э feels more slanted than others.
є and з could be a bit wider.

Paul Miller

OK I have made a few changes.

I have a friend called Stanislav, he is from Bulgaria (although he lives in Canada at the moment).  He has been advising me on how the Cyrillic should look but he is not a typographer, he is an engineer like myself.

He said that the legs of the ЖжКк characters should splay out from a short horizontal stroke crossing the central stem and that if you get the upper leg coming out from lower down on the central stem and the lower leg coming from the upper leg instead of the central stem then this looks very wrong for Cyrillic readers.  Does anyone have any comments on this or advice on how to design these characters ?



Any constructive criticism and / or advice would be welcome.

Samuil Simonov

Italic ѣ usually looks like п + ь.

Paul Miller

Interesting ... so most of the fonts on Windows which contain Cyrillic get it wrong ?

Samuil Simonov

It's a rare letter, so maybe their designers thought a true italic version would be too unusual? TNR, Arial, Georgia on my machine have the true italic ѣ, fonts from the C-family are 50/50.

The capital Ѣ could have a bigger crossbar shaped like T or Д.

By the way, is the presence of Ҋҋ an easter egg? There are probably less than 500 people that can read Kildin Sami.

André G. Isaak

Here’s some samples of both zhe and yat in both Upright and Italic


Excelsior is the most structurally similar to Munson, and it adopts the same sort of italic zhe that you have created, but personally I prefer the approach in Arno (either the main version or the alternate given in parentheses). I don’t, however, know if this preference would be shared by Cyrillic users, or if the sort of approach given in Arno would even be appropriate for a more “Clarendonesque” face like Excelsior.

André

Paul Miller

Samuil Simonov said:

Italic ѣ usually looks like п + ь.

I think I might leave it as it is, the combination of italic п and ь might look very much like italic 'yat' (U+0463) and so might lead to confusion.

André G. Isaak

Wait... I thought it was supposed to be a yat.

André

Paul Miller

André G. Isaak said:

Wait... I thought it was supposed to be a yat.

André

I'm getting confused.  I think I will look at the Unicode code charts.

Paul Miller

Samuil Simonov said:

It's a rare letter, so maybe their designers thought a true italic version would be too unusual? TNR, Arial, Georgia on my machine have the true italic ѣ, fonts from the C-family are 50/50.

The capital Ѣ could have a bigger crossbar shaped like T or Д.

By the way, is the presence of Ҋҋ an easter egg? There are probably less than 500 people that can read Kildin Sami.

My aim was to get a small set of Cyrillic by eliminating the Historic and Archaic characters and also those which are used by only a few people.  But apparently a few have slipped in because I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Those characters which you mistook for a 'yat' were :-

048C Ҍ CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SEMISOFT SIGN
048D ҍ CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SEMISOFT SIGN

I will do a cull of these Kildin and Sami characters from the font.

Paul Miller

How many people use Altay, Mari, Yakut, Komi, Orok or Nivkh ?

Christian Thalmann

What's wrong with supporting minority languages?

Paul Miller

Wikipedia is great for research.

Altay  about 70,000
Mari   about 605,000
Yakut about 450,000
Komi about 150,000

Orok 295 speakers according to the 2010 census
Nivkh just over 1000 speakers as of 1989

I guess Orok and Nivkh characters can be deleted.

Paul Miller

Christian Thalmann said:

What's wrong with supporting minority languages?

Nothing wrong with supporting minority languages, my 'Kelvinch' font has a full set of all the Cyrillic unicode block and the Cyrillic Supplement block plus Georgian and Armenian and so will 'Tobias' the next font I am working on but this is just an addition to a font I did earlier so I wanted to get away with the minimum set which would be useful to as many people as possible.  I have already spent more time on this extension than I had anticipated, I want to get it done and get back to working on 'Tobias'.

I had to make an arbitrary decision so I reasoned that if a language had less than 10,000 speakers the chances of any of them ever coming into contact with this font are vanishingly small so why do the extra work.

Paul Miller

Well I have what I think is a useful set of characters, 186 in the Cyrillic block and 36 in the Cyrillic Supplement block, that's a lot more than some fonts I could name which claim Cyrillic support because they contain the glyphs from the 'Windows Glyph List 4'.

If anyone can offer any advice or criticism I would be grateful, especially from Cyrillic speakers.  I won't take any more characters out because I've already done the work now.

There are also Bold and Bold-Italic versions but I've probably taken more than my fair share of server space on the forum and I think I can extrapolate the difference.

Samuil Simonov

Paul Miller said:
048C Ҍ CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SEMISOFT SIGN
048D ҍ CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SEMISOFT SIGN

I'll be damned... Sorry for the confusion, I was absolutely sure that was a hastily drawn yat.

André G. Isaak

I made the same assumption based on the fact that it is much more common for a font to include yat than the semisoft sign.

André

Paul Miller

André G. Isaak said:

The ghe is definitely improved. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the zhe though. At this point, though, I'd probably wait on input from Russian/Ukrainian/Belarussian/etc. speakers before committing to any changes.

André

I have re-designed the itallic and the bold-italic zhe as a sort of cross between the c version and the k version.

What do people think ?

I was trying to achieve something like the Arno example in the brackets.

My friend Stanislav from Bulgaria thought that the Excelsior zhe (both the capitals and the upright lower case) were awful, he described it as Cyrillic desgned by a westener who didn't know Cyrillic.  I am cautious about relying on the opinion of just one person though.


If any Cyrillic users are reading this it would be very good to have your opinions (good or bad)

André G. Isaak

I agree that the excelsior upright zhe is terrible — I included it because it is the only century-like (a category in which I would place Munson) Cyrillic I could find, and it took the same approach to the italic as you did. I think I prefer your new versions but once again I am not a regular user of cyrillic.

André

Samuil Simonov

I honestly prefer the double-c italic ж. The roman Жж have legs that look off, the arms are under elastic deformation, but the legs have suffered plastic deformation, the spring has gone out of them.

Гг look top-heavy to me.

Paul Miller

Samuil Simonov said:

I honestly prefer the double-c italic ж. The roman Жж have legs that look off, the arms are under elastic deformation, but the legs have suffered plastic deformation, the spring has gone out of them.

Гг look top-heavy to me.

Are you saying that the arms and legs fo the Жж should both be s shaped or that they should both be straight ?

The Гг are top heavy but exagerratedly large serifs are a feature of this font, the Г is just an F with the middle arm removed.  Should it be narrower ?

Samuil Simonov

UPD: the double-к ж looks really fresh and should definitely find a home in another typeface, but IMO Munson is too stylistically serious for it.