Helvetica Semi-Mono (?)

Evie S.
Evie S. Posts: 78
in Type Design Critiques
Hi! Here to make my random reappearance.
I’m currently coding a web portfolio (as a musician) using MD IO as the heading font. I’ve admired Covik Sans Mono and its use of a three-width system, and wanted to use it as the body font, but I felt it had too strong of a character as a pairing. Since this is a pretty niche category, I thought it would be interesting to take a crack at it using specimens of metal type Helvetica as a base, since I’m pretty bad at designing fonts otherwise. (Side note: I did discover Fragment Mono, but the texture looked unpleasant with the increased x-height in my opinion.)
I just started this yesterday, so any feedback would be much appreciated!

Comments

  • Robin Mientjes
    Robin Mientjes Posts: 133
    Two things jump out at me: the space character feels very narrow, and your diagonals are unbalanced in thickness – v, w, x, y and z are doing different things with weight, as does K. There’s more – bunching in diagonal apexes, spine of S being quite dark – but that’s where I’d focus right now.
  • Mirco Schiavone
    Mirco Schiavone Posts: 3
    I think I would first determine the relationship between x-height, cap height, the monospace width and the widths of the different letters themselves. It helps to limit the design on a bunch of charcteristic key letters so you don't have to design the whole alphabet while figuring it out. Right now some of the uppercase seem too condensed (which is maybe why Fragment Mono lowered the cap height, at least I saw this in other monospace fonts). Same for the lowercase. It seems a bit random right now and some more balance would benefit the design. It might be worth rethinking your system since i and j occupy a narrow space but then r,f and t occupy the normal monospace width despite being narrower letters in the original Helvetica. 
  • Mirco Schiavone
    Mirco Schiavone Posts: 3
    Also Semi-Mono as a term might be a bit confusing. IIRC Dynamo used it first as a term for an intermediate style between a monospace and a proportional style which is not really what you're working on.
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 385
    edited 1:49PM
    How many different glyph widths are you going for?

    Some later electric typewriters used unit systems for proportional spacing, e.g. the IBM Electronic Typewriter 50 hat a 7 unit system, of which each glyph could occupy 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 units in width:



    The width assigned to each glyph was identical in all fonts:



    The IBM Mag Card Executive had 9 units, of which 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 could be used.

    You can make use of this by setting your glyph advance width only to e.g. 300, 400, 500, 600, or 700 on a 1000 units per em setting. (Incidentally, if I'm not mistaken, this will also give you the authentic typewriter's font size at 12 points in print).

    I have done some experiments with those unitizations, and find that they bring something more unrefined into a typeface, while not being as severely restricted as a true monospaced font.

    I've written about the maths behind the IBM Selectric Composer's 9-unit system on my website.

Categories