Hi Everyone,
I’ve been working on this typeface with wood type feel. I wanted to have this late 1800s early 1900s look on it with a touch of contemporary design. I’ve classified it as a Sans but some letters are starting fall in to the Serif class.
I’ve worked on these two masters now but I haven’t decided how many weights the final typeface should have. Maybe three or max five. I want to keep this family quite small. I might do also Italics.
There is lot’s of work to do but I thought this could be the right moment to ask some advice and opinions.
I have a couple of questions:
Do you think that this is distinctive enough and worthwhile to finish?
Is there something you would like to fix or adjust on these letters (I’m sure there is plenty:) ?
Because the stems are so concave some letters are a bit problematic. For example /t and /s seems a bit light.
What do you think is there too much overshoot on the Black weight?
See the PDF for more samples and complete character sets:
http://mikamelvas.fi/media/unnamed_typeface1.pdf -Mika
Comments
If you're worried about the /t being too light, consider giving it a «heel» on the left side of the stem where the foot starts. That will allow you to stay in tune with the flaring stem design of the other letters.
Satyr by Monokrom does it well:
Christian: Thank you! That's a good idea. I will test that for sure. I feel like the /t is now too different without concave but that would definitely help.
Craig: Thank you! I'll broaden those and see if that helps.
BTW it seems your descender length is exactly equal to your ascender length. Although descenders do need more room to elaborate, they're much rarer in text; because of the risk of collision it's better to allocate more room in the Em space to ascenders. This doesn't apply to titling fonts, but any font used for multiple lines of text should bear it in mind. In fact there are very few fonts out there that break this "rule". More: http://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/20535/#Comment_20535
I take this back to drawing board and see what kinds of improvements I manage to do.