Methodical twiddling

Simon Cozens

As I try to polish up and harmonize a design, I often find myself wondering if I am going around in circles - I'm making a curve looser now but didn't I just make this same curve tighter last week? And that makes me worry about whether or not I'm actually improving things or just creating new problems for myself.

I don't know if this is just caused by my inexperience at knowing how to harmonize, or whether this is a more general problem that others can relate to as well. Anyway, if anyone has a system they use when harmonizing a font, or ways they keep track of what they have tried and how it worked out, I would love to hear about it.

Mike Wenzloff

I tend to draw circles, etc., and or slice pieces off of various glyphs to take around to other glyphs to make aspects consistent, at least with straight-ahead serif and sans faces. In the screen shot below (really, a screen shot of two screen shots...) I have made a circle and use it to position nodes and do the curves on a couple glyphs that I wanted such consistency.

Same with the angle of the crossbars here. Except I set up an angled guideline and moved it into position and sliced off the extra. Same with stem widths—and if I choose to vary even vertical stem widths, I make measurements and record them in my notebook or again, slice a stem and move it from glyph to glyph as appropriate to make them the same as desired.

But I would say my notebook gets more use for actually recording and using these values.

Mike

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Simon, I think that's normal for most people. My stance is that if you flip-flop a couple of times you've actually arrived at the sweet spot.  :-)

James Puckett

I never go through a round of proofing twice. If I can't just move on a put the project on the back burner and do something else 

Chris Lozos

Simon, it is perfectly normal.  If in doubt, put it away for a week and look again.  I always find something to fix after an absence.