Serif face for screens (my first "serious" font)

I'm definitely an amateur, type design is a side hobby for me, and my previous full font ventures have been non-standard, highly stylized affairs (pixel and handwriting-style), and they have all been monospaced (for coding), so in making this new font (as yet unnamed, working title "QW Text") I've definitely been wrestling with brand new problems I've not had to face before.

I got all the ASCII symbols in (though some of them like /ampersand and /at are definitely not as polished as I'd like, I'll certainly be fiddling with them some more after posting this) so I figured it was time to make a thread here to get feedback on stuff.

I'm curious for feedback on spacing, proportions, things that affect the texture of running text, but also curious about what things I might not even know could be problems.



The idea for the font came about through a series of thoughts that went something like this:

1. Once I eventually set up my blog it would be cool if I could use a font I made myself for the body text. I want something legible and readable to be conducive to long-form reading, but something that also has a good amount of warmth and character.
2. Serif fonts are an obvious choice for readability, warmth, and - if done well - character. However, they have a fatal flaw for something like a blog, in that many people still use low-dpi displays and serif fonts have a tendency to become unpleasant when rasterized at low pixel sizes.
3. The main solution to this is heavy hinting for small sizes, but hinting is a laborious process and some platforms (macOS) effectively ignore hinting these days, even when driving low-dpi displays.
4. So the solution I came up with is to make a typical old-style serif, but the serifs shrunk down to about half (or less) of the usual size. This lets the font almost magically transform in to a humanist sans when rasterized real small, while still having serifs for grounding and character when more pixels are available.

I wasn't 100% sure whether it would work well - my hope was that it would at least make 12px with no hinting tolerable to read - but in fact it worked better than I anticipated and it is, to my eye, quite comfortably readable at even 10px scale:

(Rendered at 10px with no hinting. I've blown this image up 6x to make the pixels visible.)

I really am thrilled with the magic trick of the disappearing serifs.

I haven't done any kerning on it yet; I had started doing kerning but got the advice to make the spacing as good as possible first and only then go in and add kerning where necessary. I think it was good advice haha.

My plan is to eventually have the standard 4 styles (Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) since I think starting simple is best. (As tempting as it would be to make a hairline and extra bold master so I could interpolate for endless weights in between...)

I've attached the "specimen" PDF, it has some natural text and then some proofing strings at a variety of sizes.

P.S. I'm curious about what other fonts are out there that do this "disappearing serif" trick; I tried googling various terms that felt like they would apply but couldn't find any. I'm absolutely certain others must exist in this vein though.