A Garamond rather Garamond: Italic

mauro sacchetto

And while I try to fix the Roman in detail, here is the first test of the Garamond Italic.

Of course, it is little more than a sketch and I myself have many things to correct, but more than the detail I am interested in your opinion on an overview at this stage.

Speaking of Greek, this is the not-GrecDuRoi version I originally made.

All the more reason in this very first version not only did I not care for accents, punctuation, but not even properly adjusted the bearing.

But, in fact, first of all I have to get close to the final design of the glyphs. Thanks in advance for your comments

Craig Eliason

Looking good! I always say sidebearings have to be set while designing glyphs—Latin cap spacing here is rough. Small- and petite cap /S have straight spines that lose the gracefulness of the full-sized /S. 

konrad ritter

I too like the italic, and I have just two notes to add. 

One is minor: I'd suggest that you draw an alternate /h/ to go with your italic. The one you have, with that side arm tucked under in, is ungainly and distracting and rather pointless: why genuflect to the past, when you can just do things better than them. That mistake also ruined Carol Twombly's Caslon. So ugly!

The other note goes to the very concept behind your project: why are you trying to do an alternative to Simoncini's garalde? What do we gain by that? Why not fix what he did wrong -- e.g., that his descenders are way too short, and the digitized version of SG is too wispy and pale -- and leave it at that? Other than a few minor, easily fixable shortcomings, Simoncini Garamond is a superb thing, and I just don't see why it needs a replacement alternative. Unless the point of your garalde is really self-expression (a perfectly legitimate goal!), not improving on an old master.  

mauro sacchetto

Thanks for your notes!

On the glyph |h|, is similar to the original Simoncini. In what direction would you change it?

As for the project, first of all what Simoncini are you referring to, of the various versions available? Adobe Std? SG? The original Simoncini by Einaudi? I basically started from the latter, which however has strange defects, including: the stems with some incomprehensible point of difference between glyph and glyph, the absolutely irregular serifs, the very strange bearing, different from the standards. And then in the Einaudi version 1) Greek and Cyrillic are missing; 2) the small capital is only in Roman and Italian; 3) Bold Italic is completely missing (beyond the "philological" question on the appropriateness of Bold, which exists in the original Garamond). I had already noted that Italian publishing is very fond of this type of font, adopted by many publishers: the most common is the Std verse without small caps and old style numbers. So, rather than an authentic alternative, it should be a version with some improvements and definitely more complete ...

mauro sacchetto

two alternative glyphs, to think about ...

(the one in the center is the original version)