Why is my font ugly

Ivan Ginev

I like the new /g a lot. The /p - /q and /b - /d pairs seem too differently constructed in this version

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

What is the intent of this design?

K Pease

Thinning in /V/W/w is too much, it makes them light, and the stroke flare is plainly noticeable. You may have to consider the option of adding nodes for a proper trap.

Nathan Zimet

@Ivan Ginev the bowl shape should be more similar
@""K Pease" I added a 3 node style sunken ink trap

Piotr Grochowski

Hrant H. Papazian said:
Your ascenders are equal to the descenders, which is anti-text (because it's potentially wasteful of the vertical space). Considering that the "f" and the tittles are overshooting the flat ascenders too much (compared to your overshoot in general) I would simply raise the "b", "d", "h", "k" and "l" just a bit to match.

Just because there are some fonts doing this difference does not mean it should be in every font. It is a matter of the optical intent of the designer, and equal ascender height and descender height is often optically correct.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

@Piotr Grochowski In a text font it's much more a matter of the what the reader needs than what the designer enjoys looking at; text fonts work on a level deeper than Modernist æsthetic appreciation.

BTW it's not just "some fonts", virtually all text fonts have exhibited descenders shorter than ascenders, until type design education started going downhill in this century.

Nathan Zimet

  

Nathan Zimet

Redrew the font from scratch from the base concept. The b p q d are all similar. The ascender is longer than the descender. The capitals and numbers are still rough because the capitals are resized from an old draft.

The font is made to replace Trebuchet in a project performance report. 

The current x height is 520 with cap height 720. Should it be 500 and 700?

Feedback is highly appreciated

Thank you

Christian Thalmann

Tail of /a/ feels out of character? /K/ too heavy?

Craig Eliason

I think the thinning at the middle right of /B is overdone and/or starts too early.

Mikhail Vasilev

As a two-storey letter, /e/ tends to be dominating in the text body.  
I'd thin down the bar and bar join areas.  
Similar thing  happens to /a/.

Digit /3/ looks smaller than other digits.

jeremy tribby

nice work.
the /1 looks a bit top-heavy to me, perhaps widen the serif a little and/or reduce the length of the upper diagonal stroke a little? check the baseline of the digits as well, there are some noticeable differences at the larger size where the /8 is next to the /9. the /0 (zero) is maybe a bit almond-shaped
/U is a bit wide - glyphs with an open top tend to "fill up" with whitespace
/T and /L could potentially be narrower too
I would try to make /S look more like /s
the middle joint of the /M could be closer to the optical center
some of your joints have inconsistent contrast. look at /M where the diagonal strokes meet the vertical strokes at the top - I would expect more consistency across /A/M/N/V/W in that regard

Jasper de Waard

The latest version (more grotesk) feels quite different from the latest 2020 version (more humanist) to me. We can continue to give detail-level feedback, but most importantly I think you need to decide what you want. The more specific your goal, the easier design decisions will become.

Example: I kept working on a kind of general-purpose text serif for a long time, and kept changing the aesthetic to fit my changing mood. At one point I decided to use the design as the text face in my upcoming dissertation. Now I know exactly what tone it should hit, and what practical challenges it should overcome. Oddly enough, I feel like this specific purpose has made it more general-purpose than it ever was.

Nathan Zimet

Small progess update
Lightened K, fixed thinning of B, U less wide, T,L more narrow, S more like s, M centered,
Attempted to fix apex of diagonal capital letters.
Lightened e and a middle strokes. I know the tail of the a is weird.
Worked on numbers, 1 less top heavy, 3 wider, fixed baselines but not done yet.
Pretty settled on this grotesk version for now, I have a backup of the humanist version that I might return to sometime as a separate project. 

I can't figure out if the apex of diagonal letters should be wider or more narrow to fix the dark spots.
I'm stuck on the letter widths of capitals. Overall, should they be narrower?

Thank you all a ton, you all have such good advice that's helping me a lot. I really appreciate it 

Nathan Zimet

Hey everyone,
Thank you all for your feedback earlier, I've finished the caps and lowercase.
I've been working on this number set for a long time and have hit a wall with what to change. 

Christian Thalmann

The /five/ strikes me as odd...

John Savard

Christian Thalmann said:

The /five/ strikes me as odd...

Me too.

Of course, if one were aiming at a conventional set of digits, the 8 should probably also be a little less vertically symmetric, with the upper loop a bit smaller as well.

Since the letters now look very conventional, the digits definitely contrast with that - not just the 5 and the 8, but pretty well all of them. (After looking again, perhaps it's only the 3, 6, and 9 that are a tiny bit unconventional, not the others.)

However, a light touch will be good, because it may be intended for the typeface to have an individualistic character.

Nathan Zimet

Haven't shrunk the upper loop of the 8 yet. 
Trying to keep the flavor of the characters while making them less ugly.

And for Mr Thalmann,

John Savard

Well, you've solved one problem. The upper-case eszet looks upper-case and looks like an eszet.

Nathan Zimet

https://www.fontspring.com/fonts/nct/nct-clarity

Thank you everyone

Jasper de Waard

I see you went back to the more humanist version... A good decision I would say