Getting the slant right

Simon Cozens

This is a bit of a mess-about project (I'm calling it Plastic Wrap) but I can't seem to get it looking how I want - I keep slanting some of the letters backwards and forwards to try to get them to visually agree but I can't tell if I have it right or not. For example, in my perception, the tail of the /q looks more upright than the /l, even though they are parallel. Similarly for /u/l. I don't know if it's a matter of making corrections for longer slanted lines versus shorter slanted ones, but I am struggling to work out how to do it without bringing the whole system crashing down.

 
Any other advice would be appreciated too, of course. (I know that I need to kill that darling of a /g. But it's so fun.)

Vasil Stanev

Hm.

Reminds me of my Wozom (unpublished). I ran in the exact same problems ten years ago when I had far less skill (and that's why it never got finished ). There are balance issues inside the letters, for example the bowl of the/a is obviously too heavy compared to the stem, and the bowls of /p, /d... seem to be less slanted than their strokes. Also, you have different joints at the same position of /n and /m. /s is bottom-heavy and squished, /w too wide, /x disjointed at the center, /z not from this font, but /k has a very bright future... if I was in your shoes, I would redo everything from /n and /o upward. (And I did not see an UC, which makes things even more complicated). Easier than fixing everything and then synchronzing the fixes across the board, and then fixing those fixes... it's a nightmare! 

Working for a long time on italics tends to make everything appear skewed. If you shift your gaze to your keyboard, the keys may appear rhombic and your monitor - slanted. A way around this problem are the tried and true flip horizontal and flip vertical. You will be able to immediately see the problems I listed if you print out a mirror image of the font, and then an inverse mirror image, and you look at the prints from all four sides. This method never failed me. Think of the story Chuck Norris related in his autobiography about a fight in which there was a judge at every corner of the dojo. He won that one!

Longer italic glyphs DO appear more slanted than shorter ones, so your eyegauge has to correct the slant manually, and it is trained with time and the flip method.

Rob Barba

Personally, I would keep the /g, simply because it's so fun.  It adds a nice, quirky touch to the whole thing and adds to the playfulness.

James Puckett

The g is fun but it’s out of place in this font. Something so informal needs a double-story g.

Cory Maylett

Simon Cozens said:

For example, in my perception, the tail of the /q looks more upright than the /l, even though they are parallel. Similarly for /u/l.

Maybe you've been staring at it too long. The slant looks fine to me. 

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

@Simon Cozens Don't look for any system beyond ad hoc optical compensation. Like exactly how much should you reduce the slant of that "a" to make it look right? Nobody knows.

Your "g" just needs an ear to be fine.

As for numeric indecision in type design, here's the rule I recommend:

https://twitter.com/hhpapazian/status/1116468231634477056

Christian Thalmann

The /p/ looks too upright to me (the bowl in particular), and the /a/ looks mechanically slanted; it could use some manual adjustments. Agree about the ear of /g/.

Thomas Phinney

The problem with the /p/ is definitely the bowl shape. The stem is fine.

Johannes Neumeier

It does not seem an issue with slant to me. The consistency of the round shapes is off, bouncing attached stems forward or backward based on where they are in relation to round parts and how the weight is placed in the round part. The ‘bubbly’ nature of the design would suggest weight in the south-west curves (purple glyphs below), but then that is not applied consistently. Looking at the glyphs I get an impression that they are rotated around the y and z axes at different degrees, and that comes mostly from the round parts, not the stems:

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

I would prefer to assume the shapes of the bowls etc. are intentional, and don't need correcting (especially not "sanitizing" towards a mainstream – we have enough of that). Which is why to me it becomes an issue of optical compensation, to bring the end-result to the desired appearance.

BTW, I think the "v" is slightly wide.

Simon Cozens

Don't assume anything I do is intentional at this stage. :-) Johannes' boxes make a lot of sense to me, and I will see how it looks with the /h/n/p/q glyphs following the same stress pattern. I'll try adding an ear to the /g too. Thanks for all the feedback so far.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

OK, I just hope you don't end up with something too mainstream!