Hi ! After drawing Geranium, which was already inspired by Jenson and Venetians, I am trying to do something around Jenson itself. That was a very old dream, naïve and enthusiast. Here are my first attempts at small letters. No kerning at the moment, I only try to understand where Jenson placed the limits of every glyph. An I test also some variations like the small curve at the nose of the "e" on the second page in the PDF.
Enjoy,
ivan
3
Comments
André
You probably need to adjust your vertical metrics for that.
I get a slightly leaning forward feel from the stems which I find pleasant--but the /p/ seems left out of that to my eye so its verticality (or even apparent backwards lean) seems misplaced.
The /j/ descender feels a little sloppy; perhaps its curve is too gradual.
/e/ crossbar may be a hair too fine, but I'm not sure about that.
I think the tittles' rightward drift could be reined in a little while still retaining that charming detail from Jenson's model.
@John Savard It's fixed now. That was because the first versions of Uccello were exported to OTF at a much too high definition (16000 EM) and Geranium was only generated at 2000 EM. Now I have adopted 4000 EM for Uccello ad it seems it works fine. Please don't hesitate to comment if you see problems again.
As best as I recall, the limit in the OpenType CFF format is that all coordinates must be within +/- 4096 font units. I'd expect you to go far outside that when working with a 16K em square.
On the right I also tried a version with slightly wider thin strokes on "a" and "e" only.
You have copied one artefact of the Incunabula printing process, namely the way in which the image of letters on type swells when it is printed on dampened rag paper, losing definition, becoming soft and fuzzy.
But, your font is subject to the artefacts of digital type, namely cookie-cutter regularity of letter-form and rigid adherence to the baseline.
What this does is draw attention to the irregularities of the glyph shapes, taking them out of context, making them look quaint and slap-dash.
In fact, all the artefacts of Incunabula typography are of a comparable and related, holistic quality. This is why Jenson’s pages are magnificent.
I’m surprised nobody has yet, to my knowledge, produced a pseudo-random letterpress font revival. It’s been on my to-do list for a decade, but it’s unlikely I will ever get around to it.
The bounce effect is easy to do, you don’t even need to create new glyphs. It’s similar to the <cpsp> feature.
Pseudo-random is a little more work, but in practice you only need one alternate set of glyphs to make it quite convincing.
After all, it’s the “organic” irregularities of letterpress printing that make it so appealing to typophiles.
And there is my next attempt in the PDF. Amongst lots of tiny changes I reduced slightly the slanting and reworked the stems strenghts.
So maybe it's just right as it is!
@Samuil Simonov Did you see that in the last PDFs ?
If you like the hand-carved look of most of this, you may want to “roughen up” the circular tittles and the straight lines of /z/.