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