Wagashi: Humanist (?) Sans Critique Request

I'm curious if you might share more information regarding your inspiration. Humanist designs generally reference the formal, upright calligraphy prevalent in italy around the end of the 15th century. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanist_minuscule

Type designs, particularly Italian ones around that time, interpreted the written forms, changing them into a more unitized system for composing text. During the sixteenth century, admiration of the early humanist types spurred an adoption of their forms across Europe, most notably in France. Sometimes the work of this second generation is also termed humanist.

Today the term still applies to new designs that are modeled on the structure and principles of humanist calligraphy. Humanist writing cannot easily use typographic serifs because the shape of the nib does not make such a form natural to write. Humanist sans serifs leave them out.

Most humanist sans serifs, beginning around the 1980s, investigated whether a sans serif design could still be a humanist one. Prior to that, sans serifs typically used a different set of proportional guidelines, borrowed from modern and slab serif models. Excepting early twentieth century designs by notable calligraphers like Gill, Koch, and Van Krimpen, sans serifs were mainly grotesques.

None of that really counts against Wagashi or suggests that it is not formally interesting. There is nothing necessarily wrong with a design from a different point of view. Handwriting based types do have some natural advantages, though. For example, where a bowl joins a stem, the stroke is usually tapered, improving clarity.

Fonts designed for small sizes usually make adjustments in the service of legibility which are not absolutely essential for those functioning in large sizes (though they are still appreciated). By thinning strokes were they join, you can improve the appearance of most many letters, particularly those with diagonals.

Don't be too aggressive with your kern classes. Using the lowercase c as the master for so many other lowercase letters is pushing it. When it doubt, leave it out.

Watch out for stuff like grouping the ogonek kern classes together.. seems like bad news. You can solve a lot of overlapping lowercase accents with spacing. For example: J caron, just pad the sidebearings. Same idea for idieresis. Solve problems first with spacing, then with kerning.

You seem to be kerning the right side of the E quite a bit which can sometimes indicate a spacing problem.

Using the H as a parent for the J, d, i, itilde and f-ligatures doesn't make any sense. A flat H shouldn't require kerning anyway... if it does, you need to work on spacing.

Strokes don't need to make logical sense but you should at least make adjustments so they seem to harmonize better. If you print out the entire glyph set and stand away from it, you can identify certain glyphs that stand out as being too heavy or light. I can see 0436, 0438, 0E1E, N, W, k, v, w, 0416. Maybe consider working out the spacing on the A, T, L, F, I, P, W,W,X,Y,Z. I don't think they were spaced in context with words.

The rounds could use some reasonable overshoots. Most of these problems could have been solved by testing paragraphs, making notes, making adjustments and repeating. I'm guessing refined.

Keep working on the X, x... They're difficult but you have to keep working until you get them right.

A criss-cross lowercase w is challenging to get right. Try to find some successful examples of lowercase criss-cross w's and try to see how they did it. It's such a dense letter that it requires some finesse to get the right weight balance.