Final updates for 2020?

Trips sometimes have unexpected detours. The font posters for my small collection of calligraphic typefaces looked weak, so I decided to spend time attempting to improve them. Along the way I tested them as text for invitations and decided three of them might work better with a slant. As a result the Cuthbert, Balboat, and RosarGrad families grew.  The new italics are simply skewed or slanted versions of the regular styles and are shown in yellow below.

The poster displays are now better but still have room for improvement.

Revising JennerikInfml

JennerikInfml is a friendly, casual typeface family that has the appearance of neat hand printing. It began as the italics to Jennerik, but I ended up separating it and giving it a different set of upper-case letters. Although its lower-case letters were designed as italics, it was originally published in 1992 with three weights as upright letters without a slant or skew. This revision of 2020 makes a few corrections and additions to the existing three fonts and adds oblique or slanted styles.

It is available from myfonts.com and fontspring.com.

Letters almost kissing

 Earlier this year I used the OpenType feature of contextual alternatives to alternate letter shapes that snuggled together such as letters based on trapezoids or concave/convex shapes. In October I wondered if I could do better with concave/convex lettering than I had done in Lentzers and set out to design a font with greater curvature and much tightly letter spacing. The result is the three-font family of CloseTogether.

CloseTogether has three weights: regular, bold, and extrabold. Some of the letter shapes look strange in isolation but take the form they do so they fit as concave or convex shapes. This is a typeface that is definitely not appropriate when readability is desired.

If the user finds the letter spacing too tight, the user can alter it with character spacing. The user can also change the character spacing and turn off the contextual alternatives to use just one set of the characters.

 CloseTogether is available from fontspring and myfonts.

Balance, Harmony, and a new font

Looking for shapes or symbols that could be used for alternating letters using the OpenType feature contextual alternatives, I noticed that the yin yang symbol offered possibilities. A bit of work and the result was the two font family of YinYangMessages. In the picture below the both fonts are used in layers. The bold style has the dark side on the right and is below the regular style, which has the dark side on the right. YinYangMessages is fun font family without a lot of obvious uses. 

The letters in the interiors are modified from YassitfCondensed. YinYangMessages is available from fontspring.

A return to calt

In May I bid farewell to calt. In November I welcomed it back.

ButterflyWings and OpenBook are two new typeface families that use the Opentype feature of contextual alternatives (calt) to alternate two sets of characters. Earlier in 2020 I designed several typeface using this feature, but they alternated sets of characters that fit together such as convex and concave blocks. In these new faces the alternating sets are two sides of a symmetrical object, in one case open books and the other butterfly wings. I am unaware of anyone else who has done typefaces similar to these. 

OpenBook is a one-font family. The ButterflyWings family has two members, solid and outlined, that can be used in layers to add color.

ButterflyWings and OpenBook are available at fontspring.com

A unexpected encounter

 While traveling through Watseka, Illinois recently, I stopped for gas and went inside the attached convenience store. I noticed some lettering that looked familiar so I took a quick picture so I could check it when I returned home. 

A look at my font Brrrrr, a font I designed thirty years ago, showed that it was the font used. I wonder how they found it.

It is always fun to see one of my typefaces being used.

Additions to FlyHigh

FlyHigh is a decorative slab-serif family that was designed in 1996. It has a low x-height and works better for decorative purposes such as invitations than for book text. Originally it had the standard four styles of regular, italic, bold, and bolditalic. In 2020 the family was expanded with new styles of semibold, semibolditalic, extrabold, and extrabold italic. The new styles are shown in yellow below.

FlyHigh is available from myfonts and fontspring.

More Kwalett

I have expanded the new Kwalett family from 10 to 20 styles by creating a set of narrow widths.  The narrow set of fonts has the same weights as the original styles: thin, light, regular, semibold, and bold,  and each comes with an italics style. Below the original styles are in white and the new narrow styles are in yellow. Notice that each word contains two styles, the upright and matching italics.

Below the thin narrow and thin styles are contrasted at the top and the bold italics and the bold italics narrow styles are contrasted at the bottom.

The revised family of 20 styles is available on myfonts. 

New: Ckornoments

 In the process of updating CemeteryWalk, I noticed that many grave markers have decorated corners, most often with a floral motif. These decorations were the inspiration for the creation of Ckornoments, a typeface family of corner ornaments. It contains 23 sets of four ornaments, for top right and left and bottom right and left. The family has two styles, solid and outline. The two styles were designed to be used in layers, but can also be used separately. In addition, the floral designs are separated into parts so that the flower can be a different color than the rest of the design. 

Although they were inspired by tombstones, the ornaments can be used for purposes unrelated to cemeteries. For example, they can be used to frame a page or poster or as dividers between sections of text in newsletters.

Ckornoments is available at myfonts.

Expanding BetterIngriana

BetterIngriana is one of several typefaces in the IngrimayneType collection that was created by blending two different typefaces. In this case it was Ingriana, an informal serifed typeface, and BetterTypeRight, a typeface with large, rounded serifs. The bold is very bold compared to the regular so an obvious way to expand the family was to create a new semi-bold style between the two existing styles. In the picture below, the new weight is shown in yellow.

BetterIngriana is available from myfonts and fontspring.

Expanding IngrianEuroikaH

IngrianEuroikaH is one of several typefaces in the IngrimayneType collection that was created by blending two different typefaces. In this case it was Ingriana, an informal serifed typeface, and Euroika, a decorative serifed typeface with high contrast. The bold is very bold compared to the regular so an obvious way to expand the family was to create a new semi-bold style between the two existing styles. In the picture below, the new weight is shown in yellow.

IngrianEuroika is a very legible text font despite some peculiarities due to the way it was constructed.

The revised family is available at myfonts and fontspring.

Revising CemeteryWalk

In 2018 I designed CemeteryWalk for a local cemetery-walk event. In September I thought it might be useful to add a few more images of tombstone art to the fonts, and once I started, I kept thinking of other improvements I could make. I ended up adding an alternative set of letters, reachable with the OpenType stylistic alternatives feature, as well as a set of accented characters used in various European languages. The set of alternatives takes letters from the typeface RoundWhy, which like Roundup used in the original set of letters, has reverse contrast. 

As for the added images, they became a separate font, CemeteryWalk-Art. The font began with images that I had previously designed, was supplemented from ideas I found on the Internet, and was completed by designs based on tombstone art in a local cemetery. Below are some of the images that were based on images from the local cemetery. Some but not all of the pictures in the typeface have both a silhouette and an outlined form that can be used together in layers, as in the picture below.

Until the early 20th century many of the images on gravestones had symbolic meaning. For example, there are two flower buds with a broken stems in the picture above. They were a symbol used on the grave of a child, a person who died before blooming. Flowers remain common on markers but now they seem to be more decorative than symbolic.

The revised and expanded CemeteryWalk family is available at myfonts and fontspring.

Updating AndrewAndreas

In 1994 I designed AndrewAndreas, an all-purpose sans-serif face useful for both text and display. It was a low-contrast family with three weights, a regular, a bold, and an extra-bold. At the time a three-weight family was not unusually sparse, but today it is for a legible sans. Hence, it was time for an update, adding more weights and also oblique styles, because sometimes text calls for italics and modern word processors do not fake italics in the way that some ancient programs did. The new AndrewAndreas family has twelve members in six weights, each with an oblique style. In the picture below the original members are show in white.

The oblique styles simply slant the upright styles and do not change the letter forms. However, these style (except for the black-oblique style) contain three sets open-type stylistic alternatives that can make the oblique styles look more like true italics by altering letters a, f, i j, and l, as illustrated below.

In 2019 I created a 30-font family of sans-serif faces called Yassitf that was also intended to be a versatile family useful for both text and display. Below is a comparison of it and AndrewAndreas, with AndrewAndreas first and Yassitf below it. Two weights are used for the comparison. There are many small differences.

The revised AndrewAndreas family is available on myfonts and fontspring.

TessieSomeMore

TessieSomeMore is a new typeface of tessellations in the Tessie series. Like the previous 18 members, it consists of two styles, a solid style that must be properly colored to be useful and an outlined style that can be used alone or in a layer over the solid style.

Most of the tessellations are Escher-like, that is, they resemble real-world objects such as insects (16), birds (11), animals (6), other objects or symbols (4). Another ten are not Escher-like but are geometric or abstract shapes that are visually appealing.

Most were designed with the aid of Tesselmaniac!. A few resemble shapes in previous Tessie fonts but were different enough that I included them. The tessellations include 27 different items from the Grünbaum and Shepard classification and eleven from the Heesch classification.

TessieSomeMore is available at myfonts.

(See also this post at mazepuzzles.blogpspot.com.)

Kwalett

After expanding the Qualettee family, I wondered if the thinnest member could be used to build a sans-serif family with low contrast that would work better than Qualettee for blocks of text. The result is a ten font family that I named Kwalett. It inherits the large x-height from Qualettee.

The picture below shows Kwalett at the top and Yassitf, another sans-serif face that works well for text, below. Kwalett was printed at 35 points and Yassitf at 33 and then both enlarged.

Below shows the difference between Kwalett and Qualettee. Most letters have a similar shape, but the differences in contrast make them easy to differentiate.

Kwalett is available from myfonts.

Expanding Qualettee

Qualettee is a stressed sans-serif family that was originally constructed in 1994 with three family members. In July of 2020 I expended it to ten members, adding semibold and extrabold weights and italics to all five weights. I also made minor changes and additions to the original three members. In the picture below, the original members are shown in white and the new members in yellow.

Qualettee is available at myfonts and fontspring.

Revising Quatsity

Many years ago, in 1995, I blended together two fonts, a typeface very similar to Kwersity (with low contrast) and one similar to Qwatick (with high contrast). The result I called Quatsity. Below Quatsity is in the middle, Kwersity on top, and Qwatick on the bottom.

The results were interesting but I did not feel like doing the significant work needed to get bold or italics versions. When I put my font library on myfonts.com, I did not include Quatsity, but when Fontspring.com came calling, I added its one face to their offerings.

This year I have been expanding families and I decided to see what I could do with Quatsity. I ended up expanding it to a family of eight. Below the original, now the light style, is in white and the new regular, semibold, and bold styles as well as the four new italic styles are shown in yellow. The larger family should make this design much more useable.

Quatsity is a squarish or boxy serifed font with rounded corners. Is is suitable for titles or signage and legible enough for small blocks of text. It is available on myfonts and fontspring.

Additions to Cennerik, NewNerdish, Eyebel, Dschoyphul, and Grundee families

Cennerik was an early font from IngrimayneType, designed in 1992. It had three weights: plain, bold, and extrabold. The 2020 revision adds two new weights and oblique styles, boosting the family from three members to ten. One of the new styles was between the former bold and extrabold. This became the new bold, with the former bold being renamed as semi-bold.

There were also a few corrections and additions to the original styles. In this and the following pictures, new styles are in yellow and original styles are in white.

NewNerdish is sans serif with a squarish look.  Designed in 1994, it now has four weights instead of three and each of the four weights has a new oblique style.

Eyebel is another square sans-serif, one with only straight lines. It was designed in 1997 and was an experiment to see how a font could be formed with simple straight lines. It started with two weights and the revision adds three weights between the original two as well as five oblique styles.

An oblique style skews or slants the original style. A true italics changes the shape of some of the letters, especially the lower-case letters.

Dschoyphul and Grundee are sloppy serifed fonts with only one weight. Adding  an oblique style to each was simple and may make them more useable.

Dschoyphul and Grundee were designed in 1995. They were attempts to design a rough, irregular serifed face that was still easy to read at small point sizes.

An eclectic sans serif

In the fall of 2019 I created a Yassitf, a family of 30 sans-serif faces. This year, 2020, I have created a second large sans-serif family, again with 30 faces. While Yassitf was an attempt at a generic face, one that had nothing that stood out to call attention to itself, this new face, Samsheriff, is noticeably different from other sans-serif faces. Putting a sample of it into the What-the-Font engine at myfonts.com reveals no other face that closely resembles it.

Below is a comparison between Yassitf and Samsheriff. While a quick glance may suggest they look similar, a closer comparison of letters shows that they are very different. To make this comparison, Yassitf was sized at 26 points and Samsheriff at 33.

Samsheriff's is the result of reworking the lettering used in Coffinated, a novelty font that had only upper-case letters. Alterations and many additions resulted in Zimric, a hand-drawn face. Zimric was close to being sans-serif, and making additional changes resulted in Samsheriff.

Samsheriff is legible and suitable for text or display. It joins a very crowded field; there is a huge number of well-designed sans serif typefaces already available and more are added each month.

Samsheriff is available at myfonts.com.

A farewell to calt?

Coffinated features letters on coffins. It may be my farewell, at least for a while, to the use of the OpenType calt feature to alternate letter sets.

Coffinated is monospaced and macabre. Its two styles can be used in layers for added color. (See picture above.) It is not a happy face with many uses but it might be appropriate for Halloween or the Day of The Dead.

Unlike Vinetters, Eggad, and BrightIdeas, three other fonts with alternating character sets on objects, the letters used in Coffinated were not taken from a earlier typeface but specifically designed for this font family.

Coffinated is available on FontSpring.

More fun with calt: Snuggels

For the past couple of months I have been playing with typefaces that use alternating letter sets, in part because I found a way to have an OpenType feature alternate the letters automatically. My latest typeface family of alternating letter sets, which I named Snuggels, emphasizes the tightness with which these alternating letters sets fit together.

The first font of the four began as a set of hexagons and a set of hourglass shapes that fit between two hexagons. Keeping the original outlines as much as possible, I carved out parts of these shapes to make letters. Each set of letters is by itself awkward and not very attractive. They only come to life and are interesting when they are mixed together, with letters from each set between letters from the other set.

It is always fun to see what other family members can be spun from one font. A thinner or lighter version was quite easy to create, though I do not like it nearly as much as the original. Then I realized that I could also do a version using only lower-case-letter shapes. This version does not have ascenders or descenders and that is a bit startling.

This is a typeface that screams "Notice me" to the reader. It is definitely not useful for body text.

Snuggels is available at myfonts.

New Font: BrightIdeas

A few years ago I did a maze in a maze book that used lightbulbs for cells. This lightbulb pattern seemed appropriate for another typeface in which there are two sets of characters that alternate. I derived the letters on the bulbs from an early sans-serif typeface of mine, Myhota-Bold. A sample of the result, called BrightIdeas, is shown below. BrightIdeas has two family members, one that has outlined bulbs and one with solid bulbs. They can be used in layers for added color.

BrightIdeas is available at fontspring.com.

New font family: Vinetters

Vinetters has letters on the alternating leaves of a vine. It is monospaced and uses the OpenType contextual alternatives (calt) feature to alternate leaves as the vine snakes its way across the page, putting leaves with the base down between leaves with the base up. The family has two styles, one with transparent leaves and the other with solid leaves, and these two styles can be used in layers to add color. The characters on the leaves are derived from the typeface IngrianaCasual.

Vinetters is another in a series of font families that is using contextual alternatives to alternate between two sets of letters. The two sets are complementary and neither by itself has much appeal.

Vinetters is available from FontSpring and myfonts.

Also now on FontSpring is FattyPants, a reworking of the odd font Onyon.

28 more

The Zimric family simulates neat hand printing. It is a large family, with 28 members. It has condensed, narrow, and regular widths and each width has four or five weights. Each width/weight has both an upright and an italic style.

A number of my type designs have come from playing with previous designs, either making them more extreme or trying to make them more legible. The lettering I designed for Coffinated invited development. It was sans serif and quite simple. A first spinoff is the monoline Zimric family, which I considered naming Decoffinated.

It is available on fontspring.com and myfonts.

New font family: Hexonu

My recent font releases have featured alternative letter sets. PoultySign and Caltic have alternate letters sets based on trapezoids. Lentzers alternates letter sets based on concave and convex lenses. Another pair of shapes that will snuggle together are convex and concave hexagons and they form the basis of the typeface family Hexonu. However, the base hexagon is not one with both vertical and horizontal symmetry but rather a lopsided hexagon that takes the classic coffin shape.

Hexonu is a family of three variants, each with two weights. The patterns of the three variants are shown below.

Below are samples of each of the six styles. I originally intended to create only the first two variants but then realized that a font formed from flipping coffin shapes might be more useful and perhaps more appealing then the originals.

This typefaces was an experiment and I was not sure what the end result would be. It is monospaced and its uses are limited to situations where a large point size as well as quirkiness and weirdness are needed.

The alternating letters can be voided by turning off the contextual alternative feature. If you are using a program that does not support contextual alternatives, the alternating sets will not appear automatically but will have to be created by manually alternating upper and lower case keys. If you do not use the alternating letters, you may also want to adjust character spacing.

New font family: Caltic

The fonts of the Caltic family have letters that snuggle together. The letter shapes Caltic-Festival and Caltic-Holiday are based on trapezoids with curved sides, each with one set of letters with the long edge of the trapezoid on the top and the other with the long edge on the bottom. The sample below shows Caltic-Festival regular and wide in top two lines and Caltic-Holiday regular and wide in the third and fourth lines. The bottom two lines illustrate Caltic-Straight regular and wide, in which the trapezoids have straight sides. When letters from the two sets alternate, the result is very bold, eye-catching text suitable for posters and titles.

The family name comes from the OpenType feature calt, a feature that sets contextual alternatives. With it one does not have to type first an upper-case key and then a lower-case key. The feature tells word processors that support it to automatically switch from upper to lower case and back.

The font reminds me of hand-drawn lettering that was done on posters and signs during the hippie era of the 1960s and 1970s, though I can find nothing quite like it. However, my inspiration for it is older, in a newspaper from 1932 that led to the typeface family PoultySign. Caltic (and Lentzers) are the result of searching for other possible ways to use the insight that sprang from that 1932 newspaper.

Caltic is now available on myfonts and fontspring.

New fonts: Eggad and Ribbonetter

I continue to search for ways to create interesting typefaces that use alternating letter sets. Two new efforts are Eggad and Ribbonetter. Eggad has letters in eggs and the contextual alternatives feature of OpenType alternates big-bottomed eggs with little-bottomed eggs. Eggad comes in hollow and solid styles and the two can be used in layers to create colored eggs, as the example shows.

Ribbonetter alternates letters in ovals with letters in a shape that connects the ovals.

I have not found anyone else who is using the contextual alternative feature in the way I am and that is a reason that I continue to search for more ideas for alternating letter sets.

In both of these typefaces, the alternating letters can be voided by turning off the contextual alternative feature. If you are using a program that does not support contextual alternatives, the alternating sets will not appear automatically but will have to be created by alternating upper and lower case keys.

Ribbonetter  and Eggad are available on fontspring.com.

New font: Lentzers

Earlier this year I constructed PoultrySign, a typeface in which two sets of letters fit together by interlocking. In PoultrySign, both sets of letters were trapezoidal, one with big bottoms and the other with big tops.

Looking for other possibilities for alternating letters, I realized that convex and concave shapes will snuggle together, and from that realization came a new typeface, Lentzers. As I worked on it, I discovered that instead of having the user switch between upper and lower-case keys, aS iN tHiS pHrAsE, I could have that process automated with an OpenType feature called calt, or contextual alternatives. The calt feature tells the word processor that when it sees two upper-case letters together, it should change the second to lower-case and when it sees two lower-case letters together, it should switch the second to upper-case. You can see the result in the picture below in which concave-shaped letters alternate with convex-shaped letters.

Lentzers comes in three weights, light, regular, and bold. It is all caps or perhaps it should be classified as unicase. If one wants to use only the convex letter or only the concave letters, one can do that by turning off the contextual alternative feature. (This assumes that the word processor supports contextual alternatives. Most new ones will.)

I searched myfonts.com for similar typefaces that alternate letter shapes in this way. I found one, but it does not use the calt feature to make the alterations automatic.

Also, I revised PoultySign by adding the same calt feature used in Lentzers.

Revisions to Skagwae

I have added two new members to the Skagwae family and also changed names to reduce menu clutter. Skagwae comes in monospaced and proportional styles and each has a regular and a bold weight. A fifth member of the family is a distorted version of SkagwayMono-Regular. The two bold weights are new.

The characters of four members of the Skagwae family have no curves, just straight line segments. The letter shapes themselves are fairly standard, but the choppy line segments used to construct them give the fonts a crude, unfinished look that is highlighted at large point sizes. At small point sizes the fonts are surprisingly legible.

Skagwae is now also available at fontspring.com, with the monospaced styles separated from the proportional styles.

I have also revised several other fonts, mostly by adding accented characters used in Central and Eastern European languages. Included are Heptagroan, BaumSquiggle, Dinner,  Pencil, Teethee, TapedUp, Rumpled, Tinkerer, and Bluster and made some minor changes to AbagailJackson and Uueirdie.

PoultrySign

Looking through microfilm of old issues of my local paper, I found this headline in a 1932 issue.

I could not recall seeing another typeface in which trapezoidal letters fit together like this and decided to create one. I ended up with a family of six faces that I named PoultrySign. The one that most closely resembles the text that inspired me is shown below:

To get the effect above, one alternates upper- and lower-case letters.

The font family has thin, regular, and bold weights in both regular width and condensed width versions. Because the typefaces are monospaced so that each character has the same width, the three styles can be used in layers to create two or three-colored type. 

I cannot think of a use I might have for it, but it was fun to create and for someone somewhere it may be just right.

I also updated several old typefaces by making a few corrections and adding a lot of extra characters, mostly accented letters used in Central and Eastern European languages. They include Twigglee, NoPain, Onyon, ForTheBirds, and Bumbershoot.