I don't want to be criticised, but I quess I will about, Curvology Stamp Oblique

Ari Koivunen

New here, Hi all, I'm typoholic. Not professional, just occasional and when I feel like it. I got very hard to stay in vanilla way but I try my best. So, this is one of the fonts I created. Family is called Curvology. It's my kind of font, meant to be for displays or t-shirt prints and where-ever its suitable. Accidentally I put some images in somewhere else in this forum, the place where font ready for publish goes. Maybe You want to check out some of the ways font can be used. Sorry about my English, not my native language. cheers Ari

Ari Koivunen

PDF Proof here.  Colorful examples here

Theunis de Jong

Definitely a 1970s vibe going on.

I notice you have a few variations of handling the i dots, accents (I like the "inside" ones!), and, for instance, the innards of the capital /M. You may want to pick one style and make everything consistent.

I like the black background, but I wonder how this would look with the outline of the letter slightly thicker, so it kind of extends at the top and bottom "out" of that background. The cedilla of /C-cedilla needs to drop out; now it awkwardly shifts up the entire /C.

Adam Jagosz

My initial reaction was wtf, but as I stared and wondered what is wrong, I realized I'm looking at ABCs and was looking for actual words! When I saw them in the pdf (after lots of scrolling), I thought this was cool. Consider rebuilding the proof (which I see you are using to test spacing/kerning, if there is any, as well... that is OK but if you are looking for more advice/opinion here it will help people be more eager to react if you make it easy for them to look at what they need to look at ((words and sentences)) more quickly).

You might want to look into equalizing weights of the individual letters. Right now, /V in Vaccine looks rather meek and muffled, it is simply far too thin compared to other, more bulbous letters. So is /F.

The lc /b /d throw me off a bit. They look OK in the middle of the word (‘Babble’), but in the beginning, not very much.

Ari Koivunen

Theunis de Jong said:

I like the black background, but I wonder how this would look with the outline of the letter slightly thicker, so it kind of extends at the top and bottom "out" of that background. The cedilla of /C-cedilla needs to drop out; now it awkwardly shifts up the entire /C.

Thanks for the constructive help. I was thinking same about C-cedilla, but haven't found any good ways to bake cedilla inside of box so it feels right. Obviously all those letters should fit inside a box, since its kind of boxy thing going on.

Ari Koivunen

Adam Jagosz said:

You might want to look into equalizing weights of the individual letters. Right now, /V in Vaccine looks rather meek and muffled, it is simply far too thin compared to other, more bulbous letters. So is /F.

The lc /b /d throw me off a bit. They look OK in the middle of the word (‘Babble’), but in the beginning, not very much.

Great, looks like you been thinking same stuff I have. But it's better to hear from someone else, those letters will go to first-aid asap.

Simon Cozens

さ and ち are the wrong way around? Be careful with the vertical positioning of the kana. へ is way too high for my liking.

Ramiro Espinoza

I think the design would be greatly improved by moving the diacritics to its standard positions.

Adam Jagosz

Ramiro Espinoza said:

I think the design would be greatly improved by moving the diacritics to its standard positions.

Theunis de Jong said:

Definitely a 1970s vibe going on. I notice you have a few variations of handling the i dots, accents (I like the "inside" ones!)

So we've got distinct opinions. I think the idea is original, and worth pursuing, so I'd suggest the best thing to do is:

Theunis de Jong said:

pick one style and make everything consistent.

and then judge the result. I mean, put a little bit more effort into polishing the accents before deciding they should go away. Btw, I think cedilla might be made inside if it was closer to a comma... but then the Romance purists might arise with sentiments.

Ari Koivunen

Simon Cozens said:

さ and ち are the wrong way around? Be careful with the vertical positioning of the kana. へ is way too high for my liking.

Good to know, since I don't have a glue about hiragana, there might be some major mistakes all over the places, I will definitely look over and fix those things. Thanks

Ari Koivunen

Adam Jagosz said:

Ramiro Espinoza said:

I think the design would be greatly improved by moving the diacritics to its standard positions.

Theunis de Jong said:

Definitely a 1970s vibe going on. I notice you have a few variations of handling the i dots, accents (I like the "inside" ones!)

So we've got distinct opinions. I think the idea is original, and worth pursuing, so I'd suggest the best thing to do is:

Theunis de Jong said:

pick one style and make everything consistent.

and then judge the result. I mean, put a little bit more effort into polishing the accents before deciding they should go away. Btw, I think cedilla might be made inside if it was closer to a comma... but then the Romance purists might arise with sentiments.

Accent, cedilla,  disproportions with l v w and some other stuff.  I will make some changes and I'll be back. Keeping original style is clear to me and must be some polishing here and there. Thanks for help

Ari Koivunen

Ramiro Espinoza said:

I think the design would be greatly improved by moving the diacritics to its standard positions.

Do you mean, outside a boxes? It might be worth a try. It's easy for me to read ÄÅÖ which I use in my native language. I been thinking, if I put those diacritics which are now in the font  as alternative glyphs and make "box" style as regular diacritics.

Ari Koivunen

Right now I will go back to font surgery use some knife on those poor little glyph, diacritics, and some letters. Ink will scape through fontforge.  Thanks everyone for comments, those are all well respected. 

Ray Larabie

I hate to discourage you from adding Japanese characters but a font with only hiragana is useful only for preschool books, possibly grade 1. Even on store signs, hiragana only is rare...there's almost always some kanji or katakana. Katakana only is slightly more useful than hiragana only but not much. If you're interested in having your typeface used for children's books, there are certain kanji you can include that kids are supposed to know up to a specific grade level. You don't have to include thousands of kanji characters for that purpose. About 1000 characters covers primary school. About 1100 for secondary school. That's that's about 2100 that high school grads are supposed to know.

Jōyō kanji on Wikipedia

Kyōiku kanji on Wikipedia

Ari Koivunen

Ray Larabie said:

I hate to discourage you from adding Japanese characters but a font with only hiragana is useful only for preschool books, possibly grade 1. Even on store signs, hiragana only is rare...there's almost always some kanji or katakana. Katakana only is slightly more useful than hiragana only but not much. If you're interested in having your typeface used for children's books, there are certain kanji you can include that kids are supposed to know up to a specific grade level. You don't have to include thousands of kanji characters for that purpose.

No you don't discourage me at all. Happy I didn't go to school in Japan or here in Finland. Those Hiragana letters are product of boredom, as most of the things in this planet.

Ari Koivunen

Here is second take of those fonts. One with diacritics outside of box and other inside. I Made pretty much changes. Please ignore those red glyphs.

Ramiro Espinoza

I think the diacritics should also have the black contour. They are part of the letter and should have the same graphic treatment.

Ari Koivunen

Ramiro Espinoza said:

I think the diacritics should also have the black contour. They are part of the letter and should have the same graphic treatment.

Do you mean like this? I like it. Tomorrow stretching those boxes. Thanks for your opinion!

Ari Koivunen

Ari Koivunen said:

Ramiro Espinoza said:

I think the diacritics should also have the black contour. They are part of the letter and should have the same graphic treatment.

Do you mean like this? I like it. Tomorrow stretching those boxes. Thanks for your opinion!

I was thinking about problem with C-cedilla and other characters going under baseline. Those are troublesome, If I make these stamp boxes taller, then original sense is lost. My feeling tells to put diacritics outside of box if they are under baseline. Any opinion about that, will it break consistent look if everything else is boxed in. I will send some images what I mean first thing tomorrow. Now its sleepy time for me. Good night.

Ari Koivunen

Ramiro Espinoza

I think the black contour should go around the diacritics contours like it does with the letters. And why the corners of the external black box are narrower than the letters' corners?

Steve Gardner

@Ari Koivunen, I understand why the Cyrillic lc glyphs are smaller than the Cyrillic uc, but why are the Latin lc glyphs the same height as the Latin uc?

Adam Jagosz

This uc/lc matter has bugged me from the start, but I only touched on letters like b/d. Indeed, I think this whole design should be unicase. Legit lc doesn't make sense because it leaves too much black space. Hmm... unless you consider lc useful for setting things like McMILLAN or DeSANTIS. But then the lc should really be lc and not some strange mixture.

Regarding Cyrillic charset: You included the supplementary characters that come before the main chunk, the letters needed for Serbian and such, but you left out the lc counterparts which come after the basic letter. Another thing: your Dje (ђ) and Tshe (ћ) look the same, not good.

Ari Koivunen

Ramiro Espinoza said:

I think the black contour should go around the diacritics contours like it does with the letters. And why the corners of the external black box are narrower than the letters' corners?

I made some changes to diacritics, what do you think? Corners are left as the way they are for some reason I dont recall. But I like it the way they are.

Steve Gardner said:

@Ari Koivunen, I understand why the Cyrillic lc glyphs are smaller than the Cyrillic uc, but why are the Latin lc glyphs the same height as the Latin uc?

Thanks to point this out. I made some changes, please look at the image in this post.

Adam Jagosz said:

This uc/lc matter has bugged me from the start, but I only touched on letters like b/d. Indeed, I think this whole design should be unicase. Legit lc doesn't make sense because it leaves too much black space. Hmm... unless you consider lc useful for setting things like McMILLAN or DeSANTIS. But then the lc should really be lc and not some strange mixture.

Regarding Cyrillic charset: You included the supplementary characters that come before the main chunk, the letters needed for Serbian and such, but you left out the lc counterparts which come after the basic letter. Another thing: your Dje (ђ) and Tshe (ћ) look the same, not good.

What do you think should I do those Serbian lc as well? Are my Cyrillic letters "more" correct now? I must disagree about unicase design. I try to make those

letters to please my eye and mind, hopefully I success in this task. Anycase it is easy to use caps lock if someone likes  capital letters instead.

Intention for using these letters are not to use those in straight line but using envelope distortions and thus be creative. Thanks for your helpful opinions. Cheers