Helvetica Semi-Mono (?)

Evie S.
Evie S. Posts: 79
in Type Design Critiques
Hi! Here to make my random reappearance.
I’m currently coding a web portfolio (as a musician) using MD IO as the heading font. I’ve admired Covik Sans Mono and its use of a three-width system, and wanted to use it as the body font, but I felt it had too strong of a character as a pairing. Since this is a pretty niche category, I thought it would be interesting to take a crack at it using specimens of metal type Helvetica as a base, since I’m pretty bad at designing fonts otherwise. (Side note: I did discover Fragment Mono, but the texture looked unpleasant with the increased x-height in my opinion.)
I just started this yesterday, so any feedback would be much appreciated!

Comments

  • Robin Mientjes
    Robin Mientjes Posts: 133
    Two things jump out at me: the space character feels very narrow, and your diagonals are unbalanced in thickness – v, w, x, y and z are doing different things with weight, as does K. There’s more – bunching in diagonal apexes, spine of S being quite dark – but that’s where I’d focus right now.
  • Mirco Schiavone
    Mirco Schiavone Posts: 3
    I think I would first determine the relationship between x-height, cap height, the monospace width and the widths of the different letters themselves. It helps to limit the design on a bunch of charcteristic key letters so you don't have to design the whole alphabet while figuring it out. Right now some of the uppercase seem too condensed (which is maybe why Fragment Mono lowered the cap height, at least I saw this in other monospace fonts). Same for the lowercase. It seems a bit random right now and some more balance would benefit the design. It might be worth rethinking your system since i and j occupy a narrow space but then r,f and t occupy the normal monospace width despite being narrower letters in the original Helvetica. 
  • Mirco Schiavone
    Mirco Schiavone Posts: 3
    Also Semi-Mono as a term might be a bit confusing. IIRC Dynamo used it first as a term for an intermediate style between a monospace and a proportional style which is not really what you're working on.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,544
    Another way to approach unitised widths is to imagine rasterisation of the outlines at a particular bitmap size, and then set the advance widths to hit full pixel boundaries (this is easiest if you set the UPM size to be equally divisible by the notional bitmap size).
  • Evie S.
    Evie S. Posts: 79
    I feel like I should have clarified more in my original post. I’m using a three-width system in integer units (1 unit, 2 units, 3 units). I felt Covik Sans Mono did a good job with its implementation, and I took heavy inspiration from its system. I also felt like Neue Haas Grotesk Mono did a good job while keeping the x-height the same as its proportional counterpart. However, when I tried Fragment Mono, something was lost. It reminded me of something Kris Sowersby said in his writing about The Future: changing the proportions changes the essence of the typeface. I think 
    So from that, my observations: first, Covik Sans Mono works well with a half-unit space. Perhaps what I’m missing is a looser spacing overall to accommodate that narrow space character. Secondly, Neue Haas Grotesk Mono has narrower characters than the ones I have designed, even in the capitals. That was my compass for how narrow I could push things, but maybe I have to push wider for more comfortable reading.
    I agree that the drawing, weight, and overall proportions are very inconsistent right now. Early, I tried pushing /f/r/t into the one-unit space and it did not look good:
    I don’t have any updates on the typeface, but from all of your comments it seems I should explore overall width/spacing and explore adding more width classes.
  • Jens Kutilek
    Jens Kutilek Posts: 386
    Covik Sans Mono uses 300, 600, 900 units as widths, i.e. strict multiples of its minimum width. This results in a particular spacing where different letters start in the same horizontal position in consecutive lines:
     
    But even if you want to keep 3 overall widths, you could pick different ones, e.g. 400, 600, 800. The pattern of where in a block of text the letters align will change, but maybe it will be a better match for your typeface.

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