This design is derived from handlettering on a T-shirt I did recently.

The objective was to keep the letters fat so that the line design could be drawn inside. I made some trials with the ornaments (a-z and some punctuation) and it looks promising, though the shape of the lines evolved in another direction. I tried to make the ornaments to mimic the shape of the letters and make up for the legibility lost because of the stencil effect.

For now though, I'd like to ask for critique of the solid version.
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=!AKJiwOswpLaTQcc&cid=F7DFB60722D34AE9&id=F7DFB60722D34AE9!241427&parId=F7DFB60722D34AE9!240950&o=OneUp
Comments
But I think the tight spacing looks fine on the shirt.
Thanks, Jasper. For /f I made alternates with prolonged crosstrokes that appear in front of round letters and /a. Those didn't show up in the pdf because I forgot to turn on calt. While at it, I thought maybe /t deserves such treatment as well. Both /f and /t have the crosstrokes really short because the serifs on most letters (like /i or /m) exceed the sidebearings by 2 units. This all might be a weird set of choices. Maybe I should shorten the serifs instead of changing the sidebearing of the stem?
For now I changed the default variants of /t and /f to include longer crosstrokes, while the short variants, activated as contextual alternates, appear before serifed letters. Another /f variant, with an even longer crosstroke, appears in front of round letters like /o. (See the last page of the updated pdf.) I'm not sure I like the result — if the user doesn't activate calt, they'll see the t and f bump into half of the other letters, and any longer passage looks like its t's are spiking out, piercing through the eyes. I liked the petite, overly frugal versions as the default — what do you think?
Anyway, maybe the place to implement this isn't calt? Should I just throw it together with liga? At least this one is on by default in Adobe apps. Even though what I'm doing here is de-ligating the letters, quite the opposite. But maybe that's just the stencil counterpart of what traditionally is a ligature. Ligating the whitespace.
But perhaps you do not only mean the crosstroke, but the total advance width, especially the right sidebearing? Most people are used to having more space there (after t, f, and also r). But my mind is infested with textura quadrata and that's one reason I'm trying to treat /f and /t like siblings of /i in terms of advance width.
Thanks, Alex! The big dot on the /a is one of the defining features of this face if you ask me. I love the small dot on Dala Floda, a gorgeous stencil I brought up here recently, but my design (sadly) will not even try to be it
That last /t seems curious, I feel it would somehow resonate with my cap /T — connected but indented.
Sorry to make this so long. Updated pdf:
https://1drv.ms/b/s!AulK0yIHtt_3jt5hoGL7BieYIFwd-A
I think the very circular tittles and top terminal of /a/ stand out a bit; a more flowing shape might be more appropriate.
https://1drv.ms/b/s!AulK0yIHtt_3jt5kf1UO_B3ktXi-5A
I'm not sure the centered ogoneks work, though. It should be flush with the right side of the /a, for instance. Also, the /mu is hard to parse; the tail should rather curl to the right under the body.
Great job on the /Germandbls!
I made the s narrower. I tweaked the terminals to look more like teardrops in both /s and /c. I was surprised to see the more geometric shapes work better, it somehow seemed counterintuitive before. There is still room to go in this direction with /z, this one seems more tricky, though.
I adjusted the /aogonek, this time moving in the opposite direction, away from naive geometry. It looks more polite now, but I think the previous version was more playful? (Btw I'm Polish
Thanks for your /mu suggestion, Christian! That's what I've been missing.
I reverted the default forms of /f /t to use the short strokes. With calt enabled, they are substituted in this manner:
The .calt variants are longer than .long ones and appear before @e, @o etc. This way the long-stroked variants appear also where the context is lack of context. If the user prefers the short strokes everywhere or in a particular place, they turn off calt.
https://1drv.ms/b/s!AulK0yIHtt_3juJ6Arc_Q9Mt9wYZsA
I think the arm of /r/ could be narrowed a bit to help close up that space underneath.
Yeah, the /r is rather ungainly at the moment. The drop is too heavy. Maybe it could eat into the stem a bit so as to save horizontal space.
The ogonek could still move a bit more to the right edge in /aogonek. Maybe allow it to hollow out the foot of the stem above to make itself more prominent. My /agononek is almost always a unique glyph rather than a composite since those ogoneks need a lot of manual attention to fit into their parent glyph. They are really more like limbs of the glyph than accents.
The /mu is much better, but still looks a bit like a /u with an accent below. Maybe explore a design with a continuous left stem down to descender depth.
I don't know how unreliable/outdated/amateur this is, but I've been seeing it here and there. Don't know if that's how someone might actually have been writing some time ago (probably not most of the Greeks today), or if it is just a misfortunate trial of translating English cursive into the Greek script, but I have definitely seen a Greek person writing her /mu by first writing a /u and then crossing it on the South-West.
Nevertheless, joining the parts seems to work better anyway, and since I already have joining elements in T and Q, this is just confirming the rule. The variant with the teardrop seems more at home to me, what do you think?
I slimmed the r a bit — 15 units. In addition, the top of the stem is now thinner by 5 units, and the bottom is slightly wider than normally (it was this way before, too, to a lesser extent).
If that's not enough, I can offer this:
The third one is not quite convincing, though. And here comes the moment I ask: do the separated elements in /B /K /R /eight work? I've been getting this weird off vibe from them. How about this?
I also changed the top arm of K. Two bottom rows show the old version — I find it quite charming, though less legible.I get the impression that the stenciled B is better, though. Maybe I could provide the connected versions as stylistic alternates? Or the other way around.
Updated pdf below, screens above are from the last page.
https://1drv.ms/b/s!AulK0yIHtt_3juN5Gd56ny8BJym9bw
Thinning of the /r/ looks good (adjusting the stem too was a fine idea). No need for the more experimental fixes IMO.
I like the more separated /B/K/R/8/. Maybe keep working on the /K/ arm. The revision is more graceful but I think might carry it over too far into /R/ territory.
There's nothing very wrong with including stylistic alternates, but in this subtle of a case I'd probably say use your judgement to decide your favorite and just go with that.
I tweaked /D/V/W to occupy less horizontal space — they seemed too heavy. But then I thought maybe the construction of /W with the counters reaching almost to the baseline is a bit naive? (Old bottom, new top).
I worked more on the arm and leg of the /K. Perhaps the two variants are even compatible? (See Kraków on the second line).
Does the cedilla work?
I'm intrigued by the different unicase options.
Personally I'd cut SS02, the M and N alts aren't nearly as appealing as the defaults.
All the swashes that end in points feel a little out of place to me.
Just love the dollar sign!
I'm not a fan of the swashes. They're all so thick. Would there be any possibilities in swash forms that connect with a thin (or a stencil break)?