I am curious how others handle overshoots with slab serifs. On the on hand I think that perhaps they should be stronger (maybe 5%) because the neighboring slabs create such much weight on the base and cap lines. On the other hand, it seems that this letterpress style commonly ignores, or only lightly applies overshoot, perhaps for historical reasons. I could just experiment and see what I like, but the final and most confusing part to me is how or if I should apply overshoots where there is a curve next to a serif like the "S" and the top of the "C" below.
Has anyone else explored these points before? Do you have examples of what you think worked well...or didn't? Thanks guys!
Comments
For instance, the Thin weight of a typeface might require almost no overshoot, whereas the Fat might need lots.
Then again, one might vary the amount of overshoot between upper and lower case, even though the baseline alignment zone is the same for both.
This is the handiest picture that has a few curves next to flats. Now I see it doesn't include a C or S. I'll make a sample with those mixed in shortly.
Ray,
If I don't measure, wouldn't it be too easy to get inconsistent overshoots from one letter to another - or is that acceptable? Or, do you mean don't measure the first one while I'm doing the tweak, and then measure it to copy to the others? I'll experiment with the C and S (and 9,etc.) probably last.
Pablo
Wow, I never noticed there was a #2 to the mechanics before. As you can see fixing the contrast for optical effects is not something I've started. I try to stay as on-grid as possible until I've designed all the glyphs because I'll often be cutting pieces of one to make another. However, that is really going to help!
Nick, I'm not sure yet if I'm doing a lowercase, or a unicase.
(yes, I know the M is awful )
I left out the S, but the G has an identical top.
It's acceptable. There are obvious ones where you'd want them to match, like the top of an O or the top of a Q, obviously. But the top of the G with the serif; there's no reason it would have to match the overshoot of the top of the O.
You'll encounter this question when you make a lowercase n or h. Sometimes it's the same overshoot as the lowercase o, sometimes not. You just have to walk around the room, get a coffee, come back, look at it again. Does it look too small? Too big? Observing optical illusions is tricky. It helps to walk away and come back to it with fresh eyes.
You probably want your overshoots to stay invisible when the font is rendered from 10 to 20px, and only become visible when rendered bigger than 20px. (It can be 20px, or 30px, or 40px... or whatever size you decide).
Even this amount looks strange when I think about it, but seems fine when I'm looking at the letters and not the contours.
Ray, I did exactly the way you said, and it worked great. I also took a few breaks and tried lots of pairings, too. I ended up doing something like half as much movement on some of the punctuation, too. And I was surprised, but I ended returning to no adjustment on the S, G, and similarly serifed letters. No amount looked right with the slabbiness.
Thanks for the help, everyone.
Using Google’s site search you can find all the references to Lubalin Graph in the U&lc PDFs. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the example Joe refers to.