Well, the new font is done. I’ll let it speak for itself.
Fonts
Some of you may or may not know that for the past eight years or so I have worked on and developed fonts. I have always had a strange fascination for letterforms of all languages. The development and design of letterforms is an exact and articulate process, however, for faces to survive and be used they must be useful and imaginative. These things don’t often go hand in hand and this is the intrinsic nature, which often seems at odds with itself, of type design.
Like a lot of things these days, it seems, people tend to want to do things like ‘making a font’, and music, without putting too much effort in. Or any effort at all. A fine example of modern thinking spewed out of someones mouth just the other day, it was ‘Don’t you just press a button to get that?’. I gave them the short answer, which was, ‘No you fucking don’t’. This may sound old fashioned but I try to work hard and to think just as hard about what I want to do and why. This doesn’t mean that the idea has to be fully formed before you begin, it can evolve as you go along, but thinking is still so important, it really is. I think I could easily go the rest of my life with this interest in fonts and still not scratch the surface of what is really involved. There is something I quite like about this though. Always having something to learn is not such a bad thing.
My new font is a month or two away from completion, depending on what other work comes along. There are no kerning pairs, as yet, still got a few glyphs to design before I get to that. Here are a couple of snippets from it……….
Three of the letter outlines as drawn in Fontlab Studio.
Here we have our lower case ‘m’, our Pound Sterling symbol, our German double s which is comprised of a tall s joined to a lower case s and not a bastardised ‘B’ as some people think, and our upper case ‘A’.
This will be an OpenType font with eastern and western European Roman characters.