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Join The Digital Currency Revolution: Custom Font for a Bitcoin Startup in Amsterdam:
BitcoinWednesday
Posts: 8
Dear TypeDrawers Community,
We're looking for a type designer to help us create a custom font.
- Since 2014 we used our current concept for Bitcoin Wednesday as rendered below with the "Good Times" font, plus the adjustments to the capital "B". See below. We chose it because it's modern and recognizable and a designer donated it to us years ago.
- Now we'd like a cleaner, more professional, as sleek as possible, yet classical implementation of this same concept.
More background info below.
Apply
Please send an email to [email protected] with 3 of your best font development projects in PDF format, your best estimate for payment and once you start how much time you'll need to get us to the finish line.
Please send an email to [email protected] with 3 of your best font development projects in PDF format, your best estimate for payment and once you start how much time you'll need to get us to the finish line.
Background
- It should be a new, custom font, so that we have all rights (including rights to any future derivative work), although we only need the letters for "BITCOIN WEDNESDAY" and "BITCOINWEDNESDAY.COM" rather than the full alphabet.
- Consequently the assignment must be considered work for hire and give us all rights. We want to make clear that we would automatically become license holder with ability to restrict any use to the design or any derivative concepts.
- The font should be inspired by "Good Times". We're not looking for a completely new logo concept. We're aiming only for subtle, artistic changes so that the improved refined essence, the Zen of "Bitcoin Wednesday" is distilled and brought out from its current form.
- As we aren’t looking for dramatically different concepts, I imagine 90% of this work would be the craftsmanship of bringing out the most refined shapes and forms, with the result being an organic evolution more than a revolution.
- For us the best way of working is very quick, rough sketches as early as possible and allowing us to see and give feedback as often as possible throughout the design process as often as is comfortable for you.
Thanks in advance for helping us. Please ask anything else you might need to know either by sending a mail or by leaving a comment below.
1
Comments
to find out more about us.Ray's confusion threw me off, but also I hope you can see that a detailed post with no mention of a previous attempt to give the original designer first dibs made it seem shady at best.
Now with Ray's blessing, I might even take a shot at the commission. In any case, good luck.
Sometimes, a company will be interested in having their corporate branding incorporate a typeface that is also the basis of their logo or word mark, and there can be good reasons for this, notably if they have plans for or are considering specific product or subsidiary branding beyond the company name and wanting to have a consistent identity across everything they do or make. Even if this is the case, though, all Ray's points about logo design vs typeface design remain valid: the application of a corporate typeface to logos and word marks may and often should involve adjustments to spacing or proportions. In that case, the corporate typeface should be considered as a basis for the logo or word mark design, not as a technical implementation for production.
Whenever a client approaches me about creating a custom typeface, I always have a raft of questions about their intentions and needs, and a secondary set of questions relating to technical aspects of font production once I've confirmed that it actually makes sense to make them a typeface.
In this case, if I were interested in making a proposal for this job, I'd be asking the client for more details about why they think they want a custom typeface, how they're planning on using it, where they need it to work and at what sizes. And accepting the premise that they need a typeface, and not just the letters ABCDEIMNOSTWY as a basis for a single word mark, then I'd be trying to determine what their actual character set need will be: all uppercase? lowercase? punctuation? non-English diacritics?
Thomas, exactly. Thank you.
Hi John, the first paragraph of your post is a bull's eye for us in terms of our reasons.
That said, it can be hard to get the people who are using the logo to keep track of which version to use where.
No, I am not talking about kerning, but (more or less) tracking. The overall spacing.
As Hrant alludes to, there are many other adjustments one can make in scaling type. However, most of the other adjustments are not relevant to a relatively monoline sans serif, such as this one.
For an introduction, this looks like a good one: https://www.typenetwork.com/news/article/inside-the-fonts-optical-sizes
There has literally been a book written on the broad topic of optical size adjustments: https://justanotherfoundry.com/size-specific-adjustments-to-type-designs (worth taking a look at the page just for the images)
Ray Larabie's design is using basic geometry, to keep it as is all you can do is a fine-tuning of proportions, stroke widths, relationships between letter parts. Or are you looking for a complete redesign, maybe with more complex geometry?
And yes, in the end you are expecting it to work as a logotype design made viable through typing. If you do not need the other characters, I would not call it a typeface, it fosters confusion.