Professional opinion about my first font.

Elżbieta Styrkowicz

Hello everyone!

In the pictures you can see my first font, which I decided to design for my diploma. It is a decorative and title font. I know that it is far from perfect. I am constantly trying to correct the shapes of the letters but I have no idea what else needs to be improved. I am asking for professional criticism and opinions. If anyone had any suggestion for the name for my font, I'd be very grateful.

Simon Cozens

Gerry Leonidas often talks about the importance of writing a brief for yourself - what you the see the typeface as being, what it's for, how you expect it to be used, etc. Currently I'm getting vibes of a mixture of halfway between Westminster and Art Deco. Which is interesting if that's what you want to achieve; but without a brief it's hard to tell.

Nick Curtis

Overall, there is much to please the eye and tickle the imagination; however, the rigid formality of the lowercase letterforms upsets the once-upon-a-time apple-cart. IMHO.

Florian Pircher

The /g and /ampersand look like they are from a different font. Other than that I like it more than I would have expected.

Andreas Stötzner

this design idea may have some charme worth exploring, but I’d say it is a very unfortunate choice for a beginner’s project.

Bogdan Oancea

The lower left side of uc C needs to be rounder, like G. I don't see why you made them different.

And uc C, E, F, G, S and X should be a bit narrower than uc O.

Same with lc C, E and S compared to lc O.

Also: nicer rounding is needed, to avoid the 'bone effect'.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Andreas Stötzner said:

it is a very unfortunate choice for a beginner’s project.

Disagree. It feels like the sort of thing that makes sense to the maker, which is the best place to start in making yourself matter to Culture. To me the worst place to start is mimicking old typefaces, which too many beginners are duped into doing.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Elżbieta Styrkowicz said:

 If anyone had any suggestion for the name for my font, I'd be very grateful.

@"Elżbieta Styrkowicz" Something techy but amorphous... Oort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud

Andreas Stötzner

Hrant H. Papazian said:  Disagree. …

we all know that, Hrant.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Andreas Stötzner said:
we all know that, Hrant.

Of course, you don't know that.  :-)

John Savard

Florian Pircher said:

The /g and /ampersand look like they are from a different font.

An astute observation. Those two characters indeed lack the distinctive characteristics of this typeface, but that's easy to miss.

Hrant H. Papazian said:

To me the worst place to start is mimicking old typefaces, which too many beginners are duped into doing.

If it stunts the pupil's creativity, it's bad. But it seems to be a good way to develop technical skills, and the usual recieved wisdom is that once a type designer is no longer a novice, but has fully honed his technical skills, then he is in a position to tastefully incorporate his own originality into a design and produce something of enduring value.

I'd say that received wisdom does have something to say for it, if the student's ambitions involve ascending to the top of the field. (After all, it worked for Frederic Goudy, Hermann Zapf, Victor Lardent, Adrian Frutiger...) If one's ambitions are more modest, however, a "long apprenticeship" may be a waste of time.

Thomas Phinney

Hrant H. Papazian said:

Andreas Stötzner said:

it is a very unfortunate choice for a beginner’s project.

Disagree. It feels like the sort of thing that makes sense to the maker, which is the best place to start in making yourself matter to Culture. To me the worst place to start is mimicking old typefaces, which too many beginners are duped into doing.

I completely and utterly agree with Hrant’s first sentence!

It takes a ton of time to build a font. This means that it is a Very Good Idea to pick projects that excite you—and ideally continue to excite you after hundreds of hours of work on them.

At the same time, I totally disagree with Hrant’s second sentence. At least, if the old typeface was any good, even if it is just in its spacing. Really understanding how a master does certain things is incredibly helpful.

I am not arguing that “you must mimic old typefaces to learn type design”—but I am saying that it is a completely valid starting point, whether downright revivals or something borrowing heavily from existing models.

Craig Eliason

Conceptually, it might be useful to establish for yourself whether this is intended to be:

• blobby shapes assembling themselves into letters, or
• "normal" letters decomposing into blobby shapes

Also, if you haven't already, stop looking at this as an alphabet and start looking at it in words. 

Ray Larabie

When your horizontals meet verticals, the connections are all over the place. The connections don't have to be identical, but in this case, there's almost no similarity. Look at the way the crossbar on the H meets the stem. There's something similar happening with B as it relates to P and R but sloppy. The E and F have completely perpendicular connections. On the lowercase a, the horizontal connection flares into the stem…why is this treated differently that the other, similar connections? Compare the bottom left of the D with the bottom right of the a. Compare the bottom corner of the E with the L. Why are these connections treated differently? The connections in this typeface feel arbitrary and unrelated.

Developing a system of connections doesn't mean you have to slavishly follow them. You can break your own rules when necessary. Deliberately adding inconsistency can be useful but even that should be used systematically.

 A common mistake: making an inconsistent typeface with arbitrary modularity. Very often that manifests in flipped/rotated bdpq or some other copy/paste elements. The result is a typeface that looks inadvertently inconsistent which is what I’m seeing here.

Claudio Piccinini

Thomas Phinney said:

I am not arguing that “you must mimic old typefaces to learn type design”—but I am saying that it is a completely valid starting point, whether downright revivals or something borrowing heavily from existing models.

Of course. Or at least look at the formal attributes of what have gone before, to understand its driving principle – it can be lettering as well, even if a typeface has its rules. :-)

Claudio Piccinini

Andreas Stötzner said:

Hrant H. Papazian said:  Disagree. …

we all know that, Hrant.

Well, at least he argues, we have to give him credit.

Claudio Piccinini

My advice: mostly what @Ray Larabie said.
Also: to “get out of the mud”: make a copy of the file, delete all the characters which you find unconvincing, or that you see do not work with the others. Then concentrate on the glyphs you feel stronger or more consistent alone.
For example, /C /D /P /R have some interesing logic, most of the other letters are very arbitrary: /E, /F and /T seem to go on their own, /G and /K look like a forced mash up, and /S is on its own. I doubt this was your intention, otherwise one could have told from the overall result.
Then, after you have set up a consistent dynamic behind the Uppercase, approach the lowercase: a few letters already have some consistency, but you’ll be able to make coherent decisions after you have drawn a convincing set of Uppercase letters.