Hey folks, looking for advice on my very first typeface, Blueberry Sans 🙂
DESIGN BRIEF
A clean yet friendly geometric sans serif font designed for user interfaces. While not stylistically innovative, it should nevertheless be high-quality – even, well-spaced, and with some energy. Blueberry Sans will be open source, and my ultimate goal is to give designers another high-quality free option where they may have reached for, e.g. Montserrat or Karla.
Blueberry Sans is multi-faceted, each facet contributing to its usage. The bolder weights are plump and ripe. The thinner feel are simple, round, friendly. The uppercase has a little more punch, a little less smile.
I teach UI design, so I also want to create a font that I can recommend to my students – free, good across a wide variety of situations (which almost certainly says neutral sans), no details
SPECWeights: light, regular, medium, bold, extra bold, and black (no thin weight since they're much less useful in UI design) – currently 2 masters.
Starting with basic Latin characters – I'd rather get some feedback before finishing out the broader character set.
Ultimate goal is to be accepted on Google Fonts.
DEFINING CHARACTERISTICS- Simple, geometric letterforms
- Energetic, almost exaggerated curves in letters like /t, /f, /y
- Rounded counters, especially in bolder weights, give off a friendly vibe (I almost designed many of these glyphs "inside-out" – and also, does anyone know if this same idea is how the typeface Circular got its name? 🤔)
PARTICULAR PROBLEM AREAS
Everyone here has more experience than me, so I defer to you. But here's some of the issues I'm seeing
- Since I've had to adjust stroke thickness in the "busier" black letterforms, they often interpolate to the bold having stroke thicknesses that feel slightly uneven – e.g. /a, /g (should I just use a third master for /a? Is this common?)
- /2 feels downright ugly
- Do the arched letters (/h, /m, /n) need to match the rounded letters (/a, /e, /o) more?
- A lot of the black letterforms feel slightly wrong – like I'm making stroke weights equal where they should be unequal, or vice versa. Is there some general principle of designing bolder masters I'm missing?
- /s and /S are, of course, tricky – perhaps too narrow, with uneven curves (I think the Speed Punk tool would help here, though I can't for the life of me get it working)
You can also download the font
download the Glyphs file and font.
Thanks in advance!


Comments
Are S/s symmetrical? Their bottoms could be bigger to make them more stable and right-side-up-looking. Esses need to be thickest in the spine. Ampersand also looks top-heavy and droops a bit.
Lowercase proportions are good, though v and y and probably w are wide. In uppercase, B is narrow, C wide, V wide, and J is going to open up too much space on its left side. Some stroke-weight consistency issues in diagonal letters.
I'd work more on getting g to match your descender depth of the other letters (right now because it's dark and descends further, it looks a bit like it's just mistakenly scaled up). One secret is that you can cheat the bottom of a single-story g's bowl up above the baseline if it helps find room for the tail.
- Since I've had to adjust stroke thickness in the "busier" black letterforms, they often interpolate to the bold having stroke thicknesses that feel slightly uneven – e.g. /a, /g (should I just use a third master for /a? Is this common?)
Yes, it is common. Or use one version for all the interpolated weights, and a different version for the heaviest.- Do the arched letters (/h, /m, /n) need to match the rounded letters (/a, /e, /o) more?
Yes, this is one of the more obvious issues. Look at how heavy the top of o-p-c-s are compared to h-m-n. Just move the inner counter of h-m-n down a bit, for one thing.Also, the vertical strokes of /m are weirdly condensed in the black weight. They should look the same thickness as /n.
- A lot of the black letterforms feel slightly wrong – like I'm making stroke weights equal where they should be unequal, or vice versa. Is there some general principle of designing bolder masters I'm missing?
Even in a nominally monoline design, (1) the horizontals need to be a bit thinner than verticals, and (2) in a complex glyph, you sometimes need to decide where to carry the weight- /s and /S are, of course, tricky – perhaps too narrow, with uneven curves (I think the Speed Punk tool would help here, though I can't for the life of me get it working)
One obvious issue is that you have made the top and bottom apertures the same size (or to close to the same size), and that makes it look topheavy. Make the bottom aperture a bit larger and the top a bit smaller, just a little, until it “looks right.” This sometimes also involves making the top just a tad to the right of centered.Also:
The top right of /r can be heavier. More than you think.
WIth the four diagonals of /W and /w they do not need to be all mathematically the same. You can take some off the inside ones and add it to the outsides.
/h and /n seem narrower than /u. If they do mathematically match, it is because of a known optical effect where the opening on top seems bigger. Make the /h and /n LOOK the same, even if this means they are slightly wider.
In general, the verticals (including vertical round bits!) need to be heavier than the horizontals to “look” the same weight. It feels like either you have not done this enough, or not at all.
The S/s can be an exception: either one can do the conventional weight distribution you have, or one can put the max weight on the spine and let it lighten up a bit as it comes into the curves and top/bottom.
What's the intent? Unless it's a learning exercise or a generic workhorse meant for internal use, to be successful out in the world it needs to stand out from the crowd in some way.
I've highlighted the nodes that I've nudged around (with your original curve in the background layer):
Also, do you have a particular type size in mind? Eg would you want to optimise this for small screen UI text, vs large display size?
You can also offer more distinguished forms as alternative glyphs, as is done in the polarizing Mac system font SF. Glyphs uses the high-legibility alternates of SF in many places, such as when displaying glyph names:
The second approach is error-prone since the UI has to switch fonts in all kinds of places which is tedious and not always easily doable. Suppose the UI displays passwords, URLs, random identifiers (or glyph names
Looking at the path construction, the capital I is perfectly straight, as are most verticals, but the small L is not. You can use a plugin such as Show Angled Handles or Red Arrow to spot these deviations.
The at sign is made using individual paths. If they connect directly, I would consider merging them into one single path.
Merged:
There is also a kink in the bottom of the at:
Use smooth nodes (displayed as green discs) in these cases. Again, something like Show Angled Handles can help. Some other notes: do not place marks manually; use anchors. Tabular numbers are often used for UI work. The arrows are nice, I want to see more
As for “raison d’être”, good language support and solid OpenType features can elevate any font; the bar is still regrettably low in those departments. But first, I would focus on polishing the existing glyph set to form a solid foundation on which to build further extensions.
Look at the criticisms and do the opposite of the recommendations.
“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.” —Jean Cocteau
Incidentally, it looks like Product Sans doesn't do a good job of differentiating uc/I/ and lc/l/, which surprises me:
Inter is another font worth studying too, it has a bit more of a Swiss / grotesk influence but the underlying decisions in its development are interesting.
Well, they must have heard your explanation of how IBM had made a terrible mistake with Plex...
https://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/53561/#Comment_53561