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.