Manrope — geometric grotesque

Michael Sharanda

Hi TypeDrawers!

Back in 2017, your feedback was extremely helpful. Almost a year passed, I’ve learned a lot and completely rebuild and redesigned my font. I changed it so much, so I gave it a different name.


Please review my new font "Manrope" 

What’ve been improved:

1. Interpolations: 6 major weights

2. Improved Cyrillics and extended Latin

3. Geometric digits

4. Case sensitive

5. Ligatures, Icon ligatures, auto-apostrophe

6. Better hinting for pixel alignment

The fonts I was inspired by: Eina, Maison Neue, Circular, GTWalsheim

 

License:
SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
This license is available with an FAQ at http://scripts.sil.org/OFL

You can download it on Github:
https://github.com/sharanda/manrope



Thank you!

ValKalinic

Looks great to me, congrats

Adam Jagosz

/eogonek looks a bit rigid to me. A bit odd, but kind of fresh too, so maybe that connection fits into the font.

With the tracking applied, it's hard to judge, but there might be something off about the sidebearings of /lslash. In this setting it should probably be manually kerned away from /a or towards /z.

The /l_f ligature is a bit extravagant. /germandbls looks too light. /X and /x look light, too.

I've heard Scandinvian readers prefer the ring detached from /Aring.

The /em-cy looks dark.

Stefan Peev

There are some issues concerning Bulgarian Cyrillic in Manrope. Bulgarian Cyrillic is defined with:

feature locl {

 script cyrl
 language BGR  exclude_dflt;
    sub @locl1 by @locl2;

} locl;

1. It's needed uni045D  to be included in @locl1 and substituted with a uni045D.loclBGR (ѝ) in @locl2 (when custumer switches to Bulgarian language).

2. The design of all loclBGR glyphs is just the same as for the international Cyrillic glyphs. It means that actually there are not local forms for Bulgarian Cyrillic.

3. It's a good idea SS01 to be included as an opption for switching between international Cyrillic and Bulgarian Cyrillic.

Mathieu Triay

Hi Michael,

This is a pretty good start but I took a look at your drawings and I think you can do better.

- Firstly, you have very little optical compensation for horizontal strokes. Horizontal strokes appear thicker to our eyes than vertical ones, as a result you can't use the same units. For instance, your L currently looks thicker on the baseline than it does on the stem because both segments are exactly the same thickness. If you take it down a few units (5-8 in your bold weight) horizontally, you will see the difference, particularly at smaller sizes

- Secondly, your drawings are full of lumps. Did you draw this directly in glyphs or did you import this from illustrator? There are a few good tutorials on drawing good paths, including Glyphs' own which will show you how to place your handles to achieve smoother curves. The Glyphs extension "Red Arrow" might help you find what's wrong (along with SpeedPunk). I've taken a couple minutes to tweak your bold lowercase a for example:

This is your drawing



This is the cleaned up version


You can see that my version has fewer points and the outside of the bowl for instance doesn't have that bump. Same for the inside counter, its bottom feels like it's curving at an angle. (below)



This is the cleaned up version. Although probably not perfect since it's just a few minutes work, you can see the curves feel smoother. 


I hope this is helpful.

Best,
Mathieu

Christian Thalmann

I agree that the curve quality needs more work, but there are also structural problems with some letters. That /a, for example, strikes me as particularly noteworth in that regard. The counters feel unbalanced (top needs more air), and the way the top slopes down to the right against the opposite slope of the middle makes the whole thing look a bit... skewed.

I'd suggest centering the apex of the top more above the body of the /a. There's also some funky stuff going on with the inside vs outside curvatures on the left side of the closed counter. Some tension offloading might be in order.

Similarly, the /n and related letters look like their arches are bunched up against the vertical stem. Their apices should be moved away from those stems — even though mathematically this will make them less symmetric, they will look more so this way.

notdef

An untrained eye may easily mistake the arch of a double story ‘a’ for the arch of an ‘n’.

Michael Sharanda

Thank you for the feedback!

I will look closer into each comment in a few days.

Michael Sharanda

Adam Jagosz said:

/eogonek looks a bit rigid to me. A bit odd, but kind of fresh too, so maybe that connection fits into the font.

With the tracking applied, it's hard to judge, but there might be something off about the sidebearings of /lslash. In this setting it should probably be manually kerned away from /a or towards /z.

The /l_f ligature is a bit extravagant. /germandbls looks too light. /X and /x look light, too.

I've heard Scandinvian readers prefer the ring detached from /Aring.

The /em-cy looks dark.

/eogonek: I mainly followed this article: http://www.twardoch.com/download/polishhowto/ogonek.html I believe this is the right way to draw. Can you take a look? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

/lslash: oh, yes. Very incorrect. Thanks. Does it look good now?


In the rest... I couldn't find direct issues. Also, wasn't sure which thickness has a problem. But I noted to double check in the future.

Michael Sharanda

Mathieu Triay said:

Hi Michael,

This is a pretty good start but I took a look at your drawings and I think you can do better.

- Firstly, you have very little optical compensation for horizontal strokes. Horizontal strokes appear thicker to our eyes than vertical ones, as a result you can't use the same units. For instance, your L currently looks thicker on the baseline than it does on the stem because both segments are exactly the same thickness. If you take it down a few units (5-8 in your bold weight) horizontally, you will see the difference, particularly at smaller sizes

- Secondly, your drawings are full of lumps. Did you draw this directly in glyphs or did you import this from illustrator? There are a few good tutorials on drawing good paths, including Glyphs' own which will show you how to place your handles to achieve smoother curves. The Glyphs extension "Red Arrow" might help you find what's wrong (along with SpeedPunk). I've taken a couple minutes to tweak your bold lowercase a for example:

1. I know what you mean. I have it in the Rounded letters, but skipped in E,T,H,L, etc. But thanks. I will probably fix it.

2. Yup. How you fixed it, it's exactly how it was in the beginning. But sometimes, shapes are too different between instances, such as: a, s, o, n. You need just a couple minutes to fix it in one glyph, but I spent too much time making sure instances also look correct... I will give it one more try once I have more free time.

Michael Sharanda

Christian Thalmann said:

I agree that the curve quality needs more work, but there are also structural problems with some letters. That /a, for example, strikes me as particularly noteworth in that regard. The counters feel unbalanced (top needs more air), and the way the top slopes down to the right against the opposite slope of the middle makes the whole thing look a bit... skewed.

I'd suggest centering the apex of the top more above the body of the /a. There's also some funky stuff going on with the inside vs outside curvatures on the left side of the closed counter. Some tension offloading might be in order.

Similarly, the /n and related letters look like their arches are bunched up against the vertical stem. Their apices should be moved away from those stems — even though mathematically this will make them less symmetric, they will look more so this way.

Thank you for the feedback. Sadly, this part isn't very easy to fix. I redrawn /a and arch in /n like countless times (/s letter as well)... Every time I add more air to the top, something else looks unbalanced. I think I'm happy with the current version. Maybe I need some time to actually see how to improve it.

Michael Sharanda

Stefan Peev said:

There are some issues concerning Bulgarian Cyrillic in Manrope. Bulgarian Cyrillic is defined with:

feature locl {

 script cyrl
 language BGR  exclude_dflt;
    sub @locl1 by @locl2;

} locl;

1. It's needed uni045D  to be included in @locl1 and substituted with a uni045D.loclBGR (ѝ) in @locl2 (when custumer switches to Bulgarian language).

2. The design of all loclBGR glyphs is just the same as for the international Cyrillic glyphs. It means that actually there are not local forms for Bulgarian Cyrillic.

3. It's a good idea SS01 to be included as an opption for switching between international Cyrillic and Bulgarian Cyrillic.

Thank you. I'm afraid this is the biggest issue so far. I will try to provide an update within this week.

Vasil Stanev

I would make the slash of lslash a tad shorter.

Michael Sharanda

Just made a revision and fixed most of mistakes mentioned here:

• v 1.002, July 13. Fixed:

  • /e adjusted thickness, fixed hinting and tail curve
  • Adjusted thickness: /м /x /X /ß /β /W /s
  • Adjusted kerning: between /I and /T, /k & /s
  • /I glyph width adjusted
  • /parenleft, /parenright, /bracketleft, /bracketright made higher and re-aligned (to fit most cases by default)
  • All digits made as tabular figures
  • The slash glyph in /Lslash /lslash is made shorter and adjusted

• v 1.001, July 10. Fixed:

• Wrong position of arc in /m;
• Kerning in /lslash;
• Bulgarian Cyrillic to more local;
• Vertical alignment in /parenleft /parenright coming with digit alone;
• Horizontal /comb alignments in extended Cyrillic;
• Baseline height in T, H, L, E, Ш, etc...
• Inconsistent thickness of /eth

https://github.com/sharanda/manrope
Or direct download link: http://gent.media/assets/fonts/manrope/manrope.zip

Johannes Neumeier

This really encapsulates well what makes a successful font on Behance, and with it all that is wrong with self-perpetuating popularity-based exposure.

For what it’s worth, a couple of things:

• Fully agree with @Christian Thalmann and @Mathieu Triay; since you are using Glyphs, check out this tutorial
• The e terminal looks very short, like the glyph has overbite
• The counter of a needs work; it pushes to the left top, bends down rather tighly compared to the bottom inside arch, and the bottom stroke seems extra heavy but also cuts back up to the stem in a sort of sagging tension
• The shoulder in nmh looks thin at the right top, probably also because the horizontals and verticals are too similar in width
• The letters are neo-grotesque, the numbers are DIN; you acknowledged this, but still it looks dissonant. Also 0 and 7 is too light, overall the numbers look condensed, the 3 bowl squeezed, 2 slanted forward, 8 thick in the joins
• While Å may be connected in the caps as a sort of remnant of a space saving titling approach, å is, to my experience, never connected
• ß looks like it has a weaker stem
• þ looks odd with a descender so much longer than the ascender; overall descenders look long, especially with the squeezed f
• ð looks too dark
• ł looks quite wide
• Why are () significantly less tall than {} and []? Consider: [(2+2)-5]+2 Or: It was obvious (but only according to him[the author])
  
• Left quotes are mirrored the wrong way
• I am not so sure encoding an apostrophe replacement into the OT features on the font level is a sound idea
• Calling out other fonts by name for their poor latin extended chars in your font’s promotion material seems questionable, to say the least