Look at me, I’m a Fontographer!

A tweet from Paul Mayor brought me to Just—My—Type™ where one can download various typeface designs in Illustrator format. The site brought back memories of college and how I would constantly draw letters in my sketchbooks & notebooks. Classmates would look over my shoulder and remark, “that’s cool!” I wanted to intern with a typeface designer during my senior year but, alas, my department chair wasn’t able to make it happen. For two years I bought graph paper, sketched as many letterforms as possible, and then recreated the sketches in Adobe Illustrator. I used a lot of ruler guides.

I called my first design Nerd. I started with perfect circles and squares to exaggerate strokes, then I used partial circles to connect rectangles and create the serifs. I learned that the thickness of forms were visibly constricted when I overlapped the larger circles for bowls and counters.

I revisited the letterforms to simplify strokes and give some letters a more refined quality. The changes I made for Nerd created a similar yet different design I called Alchemy.

I found creating the letters o and s to be rather difficult, it’s challenging to create a shape that is balanced along its axis.

I drew another typeface, only instead of perfect circles I used elliptical shapes which created a thicker weight. I called this design Quagmire. I solved the problem I had with o but s still felt lacking.

For my next typeface design I drew my interpretation of a script family. Now, keep in mind that during this time grunge fonts were all the rage. Occasionally, a classmate or two would use brush script for a class project, and I loathed me some brush script. I sketched both lower and uppercase letterforms then scanned them into my computer. I didn’t use optimal settings whilst scanning, and the result is what I called Kinetic.

What I liked about this design is how the ascenders and descenders appear related. I have no idea what happened to the i, the size of that dot just kills me.

I quickly gave up grunge for retro and designed a family using rather acute angles. I called this one Marty.

I really liked how the family came together but the q could easily be read as a g if a person were to quickly glance at a word. And for once, the thickness of the s was not an issue for me.

The last typeface I designed was built on a grid of 6 units wide, 11 units tall. The family is uncial in style and bitmap in appearance. I originally called the typeface Blitzen 66 but decided to drop the number in favor of plain ol’ Blitzen.

This typeface was by far the most congruous and fluent family I designed, but that’s also due to the ease of rectangular shapes. I almost want to recreate the family using FontStruct and see if I can’t add a little softness to the edges.

Let me know if you’d like one of my typeface designs and I’ll send you an Illustrator file—you’ll need to add your own ruler guides.