A drop cap font for Garamontio

michele casanova
michele casanova Posts: 32
in Type Design Critiques
I tried to create a drop cap font under the name Garamontio Capo (github and details), since I called Garamontio a fork of EB Garamond.
As a starting point I used the drop caps indicated as Reinassance-Initialen in Petzendorfer's Schriften Atlas, but I made some changes (especially to the letters G, M, P, Q, R) because the look of some letters seemed typically 19th century to me.
Do you think this is an acceptable compromise? Or are other changes needed to make the two fonts match?

I'm currently considering modifying the letter W (although there would be problems with the background decorations).
Tagged:

Comments

  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 205
    I'm impressed by the quality of your backgrounds and the way they match your letters. But I find the /I/ background less convincing, not matching (filling) the square pattern as the others do. Anyway, bravo!
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,380
    I think the /I is fine, but wish that the /H could be made a little wider. It looks pinched compared to the other letters.
  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 32
    edited May 14
    Yves Michel said:
    I'm impressed by the quality of your backgrounds and the way they match your letters. But I find the /I/ background less convincing, not matching (filling) the square pattern as the others do. Anyway, bravo!
    Thanks. I tried to recreate the backgrounds following the original source (Petzendorfer), leaving some printing imperfections.


    John Hudson said:
    I think the /I is fine, but wish that the /H could be made a little wider. It looks pinched compared to the other letters.
    Thanks. I'll try to make the letter /H a little wider, but in some cases it's difficult to make changes without leaving empty spaces or without creating overlaps with the original backgrounds (e.g. the tail of the letter Q).



  • C.Fransen
    C.Fransen Posts: 11
    Congradulations on this revival. It looks very nice.
  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 32
    C.Fransen said:
    Congradulations on this revival. It looks very nice.

    Thanks. It's not a completely faithful revival of the original, since I changed the shape of a few letters :)
  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 32
    John Hudson said:
    I think the /I is fine, but wish that the /H could be made a little wider. It looks pinched compared to the other letters.
    New version with a little wider /H. I'm not sure if it's enough, but so far there's been no need to change the background



  • Christian Thalmann
    Christian Thalmann Posts: 2,018
    Many letters don't look particularly Garamond to me (e.g., /R/, /S/). Why not start with the shapes of your regular caps?
  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 32
    Christian Thalmann said:
    Many letters don't look particularly Garamond to me (e.g., /R/, /S/). Why not start with the shapes of your regular caps?
    Thanks. I'm not an expert, but I'll try to do some experiments following this advice.
  • C.Fransen
    C.Fransen Posts: 11
    michele casanova said:
    C.Fransen said:
    Congradulations on this revival. It looks very nice.

    Thanks. It's not a completely faithful revival of the original, since I changed the shape of a few letters :)
    I think it's perfectly fine to redraw certain shapes. The original creator would've probably done the same if he/she could create them again.  
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,981
    To expand on Christian’s comment, despite the name in that catalog, these caps might not feel entirely Renaissance or Garamond-adjacent because of their relatively modern proportions. Making them fit within optically the same amount of border within a square “evens out” the letter widths compared to Renaissance (and classical Roman) proportions. That makes certain letters much narrower than in Renaissance types (CDGHMOQW) and others wider (EFJS).

    I haven’t spent a ton of time considering this sort of thing in illuminated manuscripts or period drop caps, but Ito the extent that I have, I have seen both approaches in period illuminated/floriated initial caps within square blocks; some make all the caps optically about the same width, others just allow more space. Jim Moran gave a talk on wood type initial caps at TypeCon in 2018, and I believe I recall seeing both approaches at the time.

    Personally, if you are going with the main letterform being more traditional/typographic, I would love to see them closer to old-style proportions. If the letterforms themselves were more ornamented, then I wouldn’t care so much.

    See for example this image (from the Steven Heller article in Design Observer at https://designobserver.com/initial-caps-the-birth-of-illustrated-typography/).

    The O V and X are more ornamented, while the R and S are more typographic, in the sense that I mean.

  • michele casanova
    michele casanova Posts: 32
    edited 2:30PM
    @Thomas Phinney Thanks for the directions. Combining these with @Christian Thalmann's, I'm considering changing the starting point for the drop caps.

    Do you think using Geoffroy Tory's drop caps would be a good choice?

    The original alphabet is not complete, as I found less than twenty letters.However, between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the missing letters were created for the "Nouveau Larousse illustré".


    Edit: a simple test


Categories