Mundane

Niche.

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. 

Craig Eliason

/r/ is too wide and (in the heavy) its arm is too light.
/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. 

Jasper de Waard

Mundane is prettimuch like the name says, to be honest, but that Simon S is damn sexy!

Niche.

Jasper de Waard said:

Mundane is prettimuch like the name says, to be honest, but that Simon S is damn sexy!

Thank you, I'm also quite proud of the double story g, since it's a little more flamboyant than what is expected.Craig Eliason said:

/r/ is too wide and (in the heavy) its arm is too light.
/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. 

Thanks, I fixed the squarish numerals, I think the side bearing are ok for the regular, and mostly for the thin, it's the bold that needs some work, I also optimally adjusted the joints/junctions on the bolded weight to give it more contrast—since the nearly mono-linearness of the bold was causing some grief for legibility. will send new proofs sometime soon, any other suggestions guys/gals? 

AbrahamLee

The upper right arches of the /m, /n, and /h are thicker than the upper left arches  of the light weight (possibly by design), but they also look a bit thicker than the right stems they flow into. The other weights look fine in this regard.

Jasper de Waard

Hehe. I was refering to the S in your profile picture...

Niche.

Jasper de Waard said:

Hehe. I was refering to the S in your profile picture...

Oh ahahah, well thanks, I was thinking to myself that it didn't really make sense to compliment Mundane's/S since it's not really anything special. But thank you. It's very out of my comfort zone. 

Marc Oxborrow

You may want to check the overshoots in your S. In the all-caps setting on the last page of the sample PDF, it looks larger than the rest of the characters in the line.

Niche.

Marc Oxborrow said:

You may want to check the overshoots in your S. In the all-caps setting on the last page of the sample PDF, it looks larger than the rest of the characters in the line.

Nope, all match up. +13 / -13 for cap over shoots. +7 / -7 for all lowercase overshoots. 

Steve Gardner

Simon Dunford said:

The /&'s lower bowl could do with being smoother, I think.  It's a bit uneven in all three images, but seems most pronounced in this one.  Same in the /S for the transition from top bowl to the spine.

Thomas Phinney

This typeface has a slight feeling of reversed contrast, that I suspect is not intended. You need to differentiate the thicknesses of vertical and horizontal strokes a bit more to achieve the sense of monolinearity that (I presume) you are aiming for. It is more striking in the heavier weights, but noticeable throughout.

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.

John Savard

What I noticed right away was that "mu" was too widely spaced. I didn't check to see if it was a kerning problem or a sidebearing one. (Although, logically, given the shapes of the letters involved, it shouldn't be kerning.)

Niche.

Thomas Phinney said:

This typeface has a slight feeling of reversed contrast, that I suspect is not intended. You need to differentiate the thicknesses of vertical and horizontal strokes a bit more to achieve the sense of monolinearity that (I presume) you are aiming for. It is more striking in the heavier weights, but noticeable throughout.

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.

I agree for the bold weight, I made the adjustments. But for the regular weight I find the relation between hor. and vert. is optically mono linear, I played with it and it looks too different when I adjust. I'll keep playing tho. Thanks! 

Niche.

Simon Dunford said:

Thomas Phinney said:

This typeface has a slight feeling of reversed contrast, that I suspect is not intended. You need to differentiate the thicknesses of vertical and horizontal strokes a bit more to achieve the sense of monolinearity that (I presume) you are aiming for. It is more striking in the heavier weights, but noticeable throughout.

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.

I agree for the bold weight, I made the adjustments. But for the regular weight I find the relation between hor. and vert. is optically mono linear, I played with it and it looks too different when I adjust. I'll keep playing tho. Thanks! 

Ok, I adjusted just 5 units to the verticals, and I think it's the right amount. Looking much better/

Niche.

I uploaded my second draft to GitHub, if you guys want to check it out: 

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? 

Thomas Phinney

Published? It isn't anywhere near done yet.

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbc_O7bNROs

Niche.

Thomas Phinney said:

Published? It isn't anywhere near done yet.

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbc_O7bNROs

Thanks Thomas, Are you referring to both styles? Because The display style is intentionally tightly spaced, and the text styles have looser spacing. Do you think they are too loose or too tight? You didn't really give any justification to such a quickly belittling comment, I understand you have the experience and trained eye—but as you said in your video that you were once bad at it—wouldn't a private message explaining your rationale be more useful? I have followed many training exercises, and while it still has work to be done, I do feel it has a good start. 

Thomas Phinney

> Are you referring to both styles? Because The display style is intentionally tightly spaced, and the text styles have looser spacing.

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.