Having a go at Gerstner

Erik Månsson

Some time ago I got a copy of Kompendium für Alphabeten by Karl Gerstner. The edition is typeset in the author-designers own Gerstner Programm, and it seems to be one of few instances of the original fonts in use that are still available. The print looks great, and the idea took hold to make something.

I’m not aiming for a revival here. There is indeed a very nice one available.  But rather something simply rooted in it's shapes. Arkiv Grotesk is meant to be rounder, sometimes smoother (?), and the x is taller. There is a light and bold master, for a small family of weights covering basic needs.

I find myself in need of fresh eyes and outside perspectives. As very solitary work, this is grinding to a halt: Points are being moved five units to the left, then back again.

Obviously not looking to push any boundaries design-wise. On the contrary I'm quite intrigued by the notion of a defaulty appearance, while trying to maintain a rather subtle sense of identity.
A .pdf for closer inspection is attached below. Anything helping this move forward is very much appreciated.

Jasper de Waard

This is really very good. If you find yourself moving things and then moving them back that's often a sign that you are approaching the finish line.

The bold should also be shown in running text in the pdf. Currently it's hard to see but I suspect it might be spaced too loosely.

Other than that, flesh out the character set, add italics, and start thinking about how you're gonna sell this. Good luck!

Jasper de Waard

I would make the bowl of P end a liiittle bit lower, and make the V a liiittle narrower (especially in the bold), but this is nitpicking.

Thomas Phinney

The R bowl is bigger top-to-bottom then the P bowl.
It should be the other way around, P bowl should be bigger than R bowl.

John Hudson

The descending diagonal stroke of the 2 sags too much for this style. It’s a nice enough shape in itself, but it stands out as being too loose compared to all the other shapes.

Gerstner’s original is a similar shape but slightly more taut:
 

Erik Månsson

Thank you @Jasper de Waard. Those are some kind and encouraging words. The pdf is updated with running text in weight increments of 50 now. There is also a bunch of pretty quick n' dirty filler glyphs at the end. Mostly to get the count up.

I do sometimes get the feeling that the whole thing really needs to be re-spaced from the ground up though. Individual changes just seem to mess things up. Any thoughts?

And thank you @Thomas Phinney and @John Hudson. Those are good catches. Made some small adjustments and will look closer at those.

Jasper de Waard

Yeah I think the bold is spaced too loose, and the maybe the light as well, though to a smaller degree. A way to get at the relations between weights is to interpolate a regular between light and bold, and see where it ends up compared to your current regular (in terms of spacing, but maybe also other things). Then extrapolate a bold from the light and regular, and a light from the bold and regular, and see where those end up. You probably want to reach a point where the interpolated instances match the overall tightness of the actual instances.

I don't know what you mean with spacing from the ground up, but I think you have improvements to make in overall color (more lose/tight) and in specific letters (e.g. 't' gets a bit much space on the left in the bold, see 'criticizing'). First get the overall color roughly right by adding/removing units for all glyphs. Then look at every letter in every word and see if it's centered between the previous and next letter. Meanwhile, make sure your sidebearings make sense in relation to each other. E.g. the left of t should be the same or a tiny bit less (because of the curve at the bottom) than the left of f. Then check the overall color again.

And remove all kerning before you do any spacing! You got this

Edit: check this out https://www.typography.com/blog/text-for-proofing-fonts

Erik Månsson

Many thanks @Jasper de Waard! Slowly making some progress here.

Jasper de Waard

Much better already, but keep going! Spacing caps is always a tricky one. If you look at an allcaps setting you'd want to space them more loosely, but you generally need to space them tighter to work well in combination with the lowercase (which you've done). 

Something that's becoming apparent to me now is that your joints are causing some issues. Letters like M (bad), N (less bad), and W (almost ok) look too dark as a result of the thick joints. In the lowercase maybe w also suffers from this issue a bit. What's often done is thinning the middle diagonal(s) throughout to compensate for this thickening effect, but you can also make the joint lighter by increasing the width of the horizontal cutoff (hope that makes sense), and/or adding inktraps (but please don't overdo it). I'd recommend a combination of all those strategies.

Bold K has too much space on the right, E and F not enough. PC looks kerned, which is too early, and too much.

Bold k is too wide, regular too but to a smaller extend. Light seems fine.
Bold V is still too wide. Y also seems quite wide.

The Q you've selected as default would not be my choice, but it's your baby.

I'm looking mostly at the bold because this is often where problems become most apparent.