Yea, another basic sans.
I wanted to see if anyone wants to collaborate on this—I put some time into it but I'm at the point of not wanting to continue until I get someone to help me with it. I wanted to make an open source sans that has friendly punctuation & non square dots. it's meant to be ubiquitous and non-expressive, so please don't give input into expression. I know there are going to be a lot of people saying there are already too many Sans, and we don't need another one. I just liked the way this turned out and it started mostly as a pass time/learning technique for math and proper BCP alignment.
notes:
• Yes. I did interpolate my fleuron.
• Page 1 is the display cut, the rest are a text cut.
• The capital /I does have horizontals and I like it like that for the text cuts.
• Display cuts are the exact same minus the /I /M /l but with much tighter SB and kerns.
• I am keeping the double story g, even through it gets a little odd in the boldest weight.
• I'm having trouble keeping things consistent in the boldest weight.
I want to release this through google fonts and/or other open source outlets.
Still working on boldest weight, but I'm convinced of my thin for now.
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Comments
/v/ is too wide I think.
/K/'s arm may start too low on the stem.
Round bowls of light figures are oddly more squarish than other bowls.
Lots of work needed on setting better sidebearings. Once that's done other design assessments will be easier.
As a rough starting point, you might try making the verticals about 1/8 heavier than the horizontals (or the horizontals 1/8 thinner, or 1/16 change in both), and see how that looks.
https://github.com/Typemon/Mundane.git
If anyone wants to help me out with this that would be great! I want to get it published in the coming weeks, does anyone know the process with google?
For one thing, your sidebearings need a complete and utter overhaul. Spacing is covered in many places, including most books on type design (Cheng, Tracy, Henestrosa et al., Moye). Also I did a video on it, which you can see here:
All the weights have spacing work needed. I downloaded the fonts you linked, and looked them over for a few minutes.
> You didn't really give any justification to such a quickly belittling comment
For justification/explanation, I cited four books and a video. It's true that I didn't explain: I expected you to consult the resources and compare to what you did.
"Complete and utter overhaul" was a bit harsh, sorry about that. I had no intention to belittle. Everybody has to start somewhere, and honestly, my learning curve at type design was in many places much worse than the average student or newcomer. Everybody makes mistakes early on. Most of us make many mistakes.
> "Wouldn't a private message explaining your rationale be more useful?"
If you are posting your work in public in a "type design critiques" section, then I assume you are open to public feedback. Plus, others can benefit from seeing critiques relative to the work.
> Do you think they are too loose or too tight?
No, it's not as simple as being too loose or too tight overall. Some relationships and values are... less than ideal.
Take for example the Extra Light weight. If one takes the cap straight sides sidebearing (110) as a starting point, then the sidebearings of VWXY might be somewhere in the range of zero to 10. But they should not be 57 to 68. Nor should X be tighter than V and W. (You could try to justify looser, but not tighter.)
Your M has slanted sides, and should get a very slightly narrower sidebearing than straight-sided letters as a result. You could use the average of the top and bottom distances, plus a smidge.
The left and right sides of L got the same sidebearing. That's not reasonable; the right side should be much less. In the lightest weights, it should be similar to VWXY (0-10), and in heaviest weights, still maybe
Similarly: the T, and the serifed cap I (although with two strokes, it will get more sidebearing, especially in the heaviest weight.
Your I with its serifs gets the same sidebearing as the flat-sided letters. That's not right, it should be much tighter.
These are just some examples, not an exhaustive list.