discuss with me my latest work.

smesnoj wjatscheslaw

Hey, i've been told i could find professional critique on this board. And according to my judgement this seems to be very true.

I'd like you to discuss with me my latest work. I dont want to go too much in the details because I'd like to know the general appeal/opinion. I'm a novice typo-designer and have been working on this type over the course of the last four months. I actually used this time to just focus on the minuscule glyphs. Here's some images. Attention! Some minor mistakes im aware of are the unaligned positions of curve pointers which lead to ove+/undershooting of glyphs.




I've been working with fontcreator (windows OS) and (noob alert) illustrator, because it's the vector software i'm familiar with. I would really like to try out other software like Glyphs but thats what my time and budget allow me at the moment.






It might look a bit different because its not made for monitors mainly. But I'd still like it to be desktop compatible. But out of some reason im constantly running against a wall when it comes to this. The pixels behave constantly different and this is a mistery to me.. different story if i'd use it as a display font.




If you have suggestions that arent so easy to communicate over words just use this image and draw over it.


Keep in mind im new in this genre and im pretty sure i might've violated some typographical rules i've not heard of yet. But thats why i opened this thread. To discuss and if sucessfull end up with more knowledge than before.

Cheers.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

First thing first: vertical proportions. Your ascenders have two alignments, and your descenders have three. Also, the descender space is greater than the ascender space. If this is a display face all this could be part of its character, but for a text face it's a severe compromise of how the vertical space is used, when lines are set without much space... which is integral to optimal reading.

James Puckett

This typeface suffers from mixed metaphors; being both a new take on serifs and Cheltenham. The ball terminals are one font. The squarish round glyphs come from another. The traditionally terminaled v w x z from a third. k is a mongrel offspring of h and v, y is the sci-fi child of three worlds. Upper serifs are some new semi-flaccid metaphor, baseline serifs are mired in the time of Clarendon. It’s like those special episodes of Dr. Who where six time lords are all running around like maniacs and the Tardis is on the edge of imploding.

Reconciling all of these in a single font isn’t going to happen. Pick a direction—something new, or something Goodhue—and run with it. I recommend the new angle; I don’t think Cheltenham is making a comeback any time soon. But what do I know; I thought Brandon Grotesque would be the last word on the low x-height geometric sans fad.

Thomas Phinney

“It is not made for monitors mainly.”

OK, what is is made for? Print? At what sizes? What is the ideal (design) size for it to be used at? What kinds of uses do you intend it to have?

I can certainly see plenty of issues, and agree with Hrant and James’ comments.

I also see a lot of spacing issues. Have you done kerning as well, already? Perhaps you're doing overly strong kerning and/or trying to correct spacing problems with kerning. But this sort of thing is best diagnosed by examining the actual font.