Television Sans - my first typeface

sammularczyk
sammularczyk Posts: 3
edited October 4 in Type Design Critiques
A few months ago I started playing around with making a typeface in Glyphs for the first time. It's inspired by old Commodore 64 ads which used some variant of Kabel, but aiming to be a bit friendlier and more modern.

My background's in graphic and motion design, but I've always seen type as pretty central to my work. So jumping in and developing a typeface was the next step I guess!

I'd really love some critique on what I could do to improve consistency, fix basic mistakes I've made, things I've missed. Any techniques to improve readability over longer lines would be lovely too. I'm curious how the kerning comes across as well.


Thanks so much for your time!






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  • sammularczyk
    sammularczyk Posts: 3
    Attached below is a proof PDF since it didnt work the first time!
  • Craig Eliason
    Craig Eliason Posts: 1,531
    Just going by the preview image, the /n's feel dented in on the top of the right side, and because their counter spaces are so relatively large they feel too wide for the color of this typeface. Bold lowercase /s and regular uppercase /S read as larger on the top and leaning back slightly, while regular lowercase /s shares neither of those traits. /t crossbar may be too thick, and the letter doesn't sit on the baseline very well. In my thinking it's often nice to have the balance between counters of /a and of /e relate to each other which isn't the case here. 
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,213
    edited October 8
    Specifically, on the “n” the interior and exterior apex positions are fine. The problem is also how sudden the onset of the curve is on the outside at the right, when you go from the straight to the curve. This can be fixed by pulling up significantly on the off-curve point there.

    edit: same problem with the “h” as well, and a similar but less problematic thing happens with the straight-to-curve transition on the lowercase “a”
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,213
    edited October 8
    I am also thinking you need to learn about overshoot. And maybe vertical vs horizontal stroke thicknesses. And... you know, actually, just watch this video on optical compensations in type design:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR-CG5eB3nQ

    (Yes, the video is old and I used a now-ancient editor, FontLab Studio 5. But the issues and how to address them are unchanged, even if we are on FontLab 8 and Glyphs 4 and other editors these days.)
  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,584
    Sam: PDF was still not attached, btw

    Thomas' video is pretty classic and there are now A LOT of great resources listed on https://typedesignresources.com that I encourage you to invest time into reading/watching. 
  • sammularczyk
    sammularczyk Posts: 3
    Thank you all so much! A lot to think about, I really appreciate your honest thoughts. Will be back after I've digested a few! 

    Not sure why the proof is not uploading unfortunately... will try again...

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