Playing around with Venetians

Craig Eliason

I know the super wide /H/ comes from Jenson so maybe you won't want to narrow it, but perhaps its crossbar could be thickened a little to help bridge the gap.
Not sure if your diacriticals are just placeholders or not, but they seem way too tiny.

ivan louette

Thanks ! Done for the /H/ I changed the files.
About diacritics on lower case I can assume that they are way big enough to manage a fine reading flow in french (my mother language) or I suppose in other languages which use them extensively. Making them bigger hurts the eye (I did a lot of resizing trials). However they are perhaps too tiny on caps.

Craig Eliason

Yes, I only meant in the all-caps specimen.

ivan louette

I changed the diacritics and the caps file. Perhaps still a little bit too shy…
However I increased again the width of the /H/ transversal and that's better now.

ivan louette

Curiosity drives me to test subcaps. And surprizingly while caps aren't remarquable subcaps give a very interesting results, isolated inside text blocks or replacing the whole lower case in text.

André G. Isaak

I don’t have much in the way of constructive criticism, but I do hope you plan to eventually offer this font up for sale.

ivan louette

@André G. IsaakMy idea is to offer it for free (as I would do for the other ones I designed before). I think perhaps it lacks some Jenson revival in the free open source area. At the moment I investigate about platforms to share my free fonts.

André G. Isaak

Even beter! I just look forward to it being available!

ivan louette

And this is not an April fool

Christian Thalmann

Nice going, overall!

I assume your capitals are still at draft stage? The /H/N/W strike me as much too wide, perhaps also the /D/S/T/U a little bit... The /K feels cramped, though. The /R is lifting its right leg; it could use a bit more weight close to the tip.

I like your lowercase a lot. The /e looks a bit uncomfortably pinched, but I suppose that's just the Venetian style. It does look a bit narrow compared to the very generous /a, though. Is the /g perhaps a bit to light?

I'd prefer the /4 to resonate with the /7 rather than /3/5/9. That little pseudo-tail irritates me a bit.

Thanks for going open source!

ivan louette

Thanks for your advice !

I made the /N/W/U slightly narrower (/W/U didn't exist in Original Jenson, thus I can only try to draw a visual which works in text) ; because I found several width of /N in Jenson prints I changed to what could be the best average ; however I made /H a little wider and gave more weight to its horizontal bar ; I moved the /D vertical slightly to the right (it's total width was right but I don't understand why I moved it wrong) ; I moved the right /R foot below and gave it more weight. I changed /K too but I am not totally satisfied about it at the moment. /S/T are correct for me.

/a/e are right  in their respective width considering Jenson and that's what gives the best results to rythmics in this particular typeface ; /g is right too, it seems Nicolas Jenson anticipated the influence of its complexity to the average color of the text and thus he drew larger counterpunches.

About /4 I changed it too and I made /6 and /9 slightly lighter.

Nathan Zimet

Does the tip of the capital Q's tail get a bit thin?

ivan louette

@Nathan Zimet It's always quite thin and sometimes nearly pointed in Jenson.

Steve Gardner

@ivan louette - the /V and /W appear to lean slightly to the left, whilst the /v and /w lean to the right.  Is this intentional?

ivan louette

@Steve Gardner Yes this is intentional as is the angle of /S. I always keep in mind the way of how works original Jenson on its historical prints. Of course some irregularities are due to the printing techniques, but some other ones aren't and that's what draw my attention : often after trying to change (or to correct) what I find a bit "funny" I see that my solution doesn't work so well. Perhaps /V leans to the left to relax slightly the titles composed in caps (the same could be true for the very wide /H an /N). On the other hand my feeling is that Nicolas Jenson capitals are somewhat intermediate between ornamental and text letters. Don't forget that Lettrines and other ornaments were still very important at Jenson's time. At the opposite the lower case letters are very rigorous in their drawing and their dynamics to the right is very important. At one time I tested to slant lightly /v and /w to the left when I created them, and finally I have chosen to match the /y because that works better for the reading flow in this font.

Because I am battling every day to better understand Jenson's original font here is my next attempt. The most visible change is in /e ; the previous transversal version was too approximative. In fact it's tip is even longer in the original prints, but often its missing because of the inking process which erases too tiny details. But this is a component of the lightness and the elegance of this letter. The inclination of this transversal was wrong too in my previous attempts.

ivan louette

Here are my progresses. At the moment I have definitely chosen a text look, which is closer to Nicolas Jenson prints. Last weeks I worked to Extend the latin characters to A and B (see my characters sample). Jenson's ligatures are activated by default (but the only one visible is /ct). I join a latin text sample extracted from his EUSEBIUS and where I use long s and its ligatures.

ivan louette

Having fun with Jenson's special characters diacritics and others.

Robin Parmar

This is so beautiful! Is this a project you will be sharing?

ivan louette

@Robin Parmar Thanks for your comment and sorry for the delay to reply. Too many things outside of typo for me theses times. Yes I will share this project and this font will be free and open source