Will this work for Greek?

Ebern Klause

Hello everybody,

My name is Ebern and I have been working on my first solo type project for quite a while now. It is still a work in progress but I feel I’ve come to a point where I need some feedback.

‘Neutor’ (working title) is a font family that contains Latin and Cyrillic but also a Greek character set. I have some experience with type design but I have very little experience with Greek - though i’ve been studying hard :-) - so I would like to get some feedback from native Greek type people on my design. 

[The same goes for Cyrillic, but I have posted that in a separate thread.]

It is my aim to make a very functional but rather minimal typeface without sacrificing legibility, readability or personality. The result is monolinear, rounded, and somewhere in the middle between a Sans, a Slab and a Serif.

On the one hand I have tried to reduce every glyph shape to it’s minimum without being overly simplistic. On the other hand I’ve tried to give every glyph the shape that it needs to function well within context, in any situation, which means I have sometimes deviated from what is standard or traditionally accepted. 

When researching the Greek alphabet I didn’t always find it easy to determine the exact basic ground shape for some glyphs, which led me to make my own interpretations with the risk of getting it wrong. Again, I’ve tried to keep glyph shapes as simple as possible but without being too simple.

I am reasonably happy with the result so far but I am biased of course, so please Greek type people, give me your opinion. Is this a valid design for general purpose Greek use or did I interpret wrongly?

Thank you for your feedback.

Ebern Klause

George Triantafyllakos

Hello Ebern. I think overall the Greek characters are correct in terms of shape and flow. Just a few minor notes:

1. I wouldn't make gamma's ascender straight and not bending to the left (at least not so much - if you want you can keep a slight curve where the two diagonals meet, but I would see the ascender looking down eventually).

2. I would work a little bit more on the upper part of delta, making it a little rounder and starting the turn a little higher (and not so close to the bowl of the character).

3. I would also see a more straight variation on the left foot of the lambda. I understand the this rather obvious break is in sync with the overall style of the typeface but maybe it is too much.

Nice work.

Ebern Klause

Hello George, thanks for your helpful remarks! I will look into the points you mention.

Ebern Klause

@George Triantafyllakos

I’ve changed the lambda, delta and gamma a bit according to your suggestions, the lambda not all the way though. 

I also made an alternative gamma that has a more clearly defined shape. I quite like it but it probably stands out too much.

John Savard

Not being a native speaker of Greek, I hesitate to comment in this area, but it seems to me that the change in direction of the left descender of the lower-case lambda as it joins up with the main stem is visually distracting.

I've done a quick check of a few Greek typefaces, and in particular I looked at Greek lettering for drafting as well, and I didn't see any where the lambda had this characteristic.

However, in your body copy samples, I can see that this characteristic does perform one useful function - it causes the lowercase lambda to relate well to the x-height, the way all the lower-case letters with ascenders in the Latin alphabet do.

But Greeks may not need to have the lambda do that.