My First Serious Font Project "Point out it all"

Eryk Kosinski
Eryk Kosinski Posts: 72
in Lettering Critiques
After learning type design and its principles for months I decided to start my first serious project. It is a Sans Serif family which I want to have a role of a Text Face. Currently I designed basic A to Z low and caps glyphs with period and comma for testing. I would appreciate all the mistakes and changes that could be made to make the typeface high quality. No kerning has been done yet. Sidebearings are set to 60 units for now "FontLab7". 

Comments

  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,440
    edited March 2021
    A good idea: thinking of kerning as something you establish later in the process, after the glyph design is mostly set.
    A bad idea: thinking of sidebearings as something you establish later in the process, after the glyph design is mostly set.

    What is your target size? At the small size of the paragraphs shown, all those intricate roundings are either pointless or even counterproductive (thickening the intersection of /t for example). And it's also too light for most applications at that size. 

    Try not to think of making each letter look great as you see it (big on your screen and isolated), but rather make them look great as they will be encountered (set in compositions at target reading size). This is a perspective that nearly every beginner has to be told, and it's even one I have to consciously remind myself about even after doing type design for some years.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    edited March 2021
    Except for the capital "I" being too close when in pairs, even after you noted the issue, I couldn't see anything wrong, so this just shows why it's good to have font projects looked at in a forum with so many professional type designers.
    After closer scrutiny, though, now that you mention it, I can see that the left sidebearing on the lower-case p is too small, and basically the sidebearings on any vertical lines are too small. Also, for some reason, lower-case "a" seems to have extra-wide sidebearings around it.
    For the most part, he seems to have largely succeeded in his goal of making a sans-serif typeface that can be used for text; in my opinion, Univers succeeded at this, while Helvetica somewhat missed the mark, so this is a difficult goal.

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