Wednesday, January 22, 2020

FeggoliteMono reimagined

During my prime as a typographer, I was fascinated with monospaced or typewriter fonts. I am not sure the reason for this interest, but I ended up designing quite a number of them.

Possibly the strangest of my monospaced designs was FeggoliteMono. It was an attempt to create a decorative face that could have been done on a typewriter.  Although it had no obvious uses, I kept toying with the design, seeing what else I could tease from it. I tried to make it more legible, and then I distorted that variant and put it in boxes. As 2020 began, I noticed that neither of the two weights of the original was a true bold, so I decided to add one.

As I played with it, I thought an italics might be a useful addition and I was surprised to find that what I came up with seemed to be a better attempt at a monospaced, decorative typeface than the original. I had never been happy with the original y and the original g was also funky, so I redid these glyphs, keeping the original y as an alternate that can be accessed via an OpenType stylistic alternative.

Because the family is monospaced and each weight has the same character width, for many of the characters one can overlay the thinner weights over the bolder weights. An example is shown below.
For more information, follow the link. The family is also available on fontspring.

Monday, January 20, 2020

Revivals

I have revived three old type families that I had abandoned for many years. They were all hybrids, that is, they were created by blending versions of other fonts that I had constructed. They were not created to serve any purpose but rather were the result of my curiosity. Fontographer had been given the ability to blend two existing fonts (which can be very useful for creating different widths and weights) and I wanted to see what would happen if I fed the blending process various fonts.

Some of the results were attractive and some less so. The fonts created by blending in KampFriendship, a hand-drawn font with serifs, seemed less pleasing than other blends, so I set them aside when I began to list fonts on myfonts.com. However, they are very legible at small point sizes and someone somewhere may find a use for them. I have cleaned them up (blending can leave a lot of oddities, especially when mixing two quite different fonts) and added new styles to two of them. They are now available on fontspring.com

Examples of the three font families are shown below with a sample from the plain and bold-italics styles. The font families are, from top to bottom, EuroikaKamp, BetterKamp, and KampIngriana. For more information, follow the links.


Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Bigger families

For much of December I worked on adding additional weights to three font families.  The revised families are now available on myfonts.com

Euroika has six new members: light, light-italic, semibold, semibold-italic, extrabold, and extra-bolditalic. Below the new weights are shown in black  and the old weights in blue.
KampFriendship also has six new members: thin, thin-italic, semibold, semibold-italic, extrabold, and extra-bolditalic.
Ingriana has four new members: light, light-italic, semibold, & semibold-italic.
All families added more OpenType features. Each now has superscript and subscript numbers that can also be used to form fractions. Euroika and Ingriana also have monospaced numbers that can be accessed via OpenType. Below the sets of regular and monospaced numbers are shown for Ingriana.
As you can see in the above samples, both Euroika and Ingriana have non-traditional italics. None of these fonts was constructed with a specific purpose in mind.

When these font families were constructed in the early to mid 1990s, a complete font family consisted of plain, bold, italic, and bold-italic. Now some of the new font families appearing on myfonts.com have over 100 family members.

(These typefaces are also available at fontspring.com. See here, here, and here.)