BigStripesMono, a different kind of striped text

The latest stop on my exploration of ways to use the OpenType feature Contextual Alternatives is a typeface family named BigStripesMono. As the name suggests, it is a monospaced family that can create striped text, with a stripe different from other striped text. The stripe is not apparent in a single character but only becomes visible when members of the family are properly layered. Two of the four family members, the regular and outline styles, look ordinary. The other two contain half letters and these create the striped effect when properly layered over the regular or outline styles. The sample in the illustration shows the stripe. 

This use of contextual alternatives is completely different from my past uses. I began with letters forced into a two complementary template shapes: PoultrySign, Caltic, Lentzers, Snuggles, CloseTogether, ZoidicFun (Trapezoidal), Lopsickles, and Hexonu. I also did ordinary letters on complementary objects: Vinetters, BrightIdeas, Eggad, Coffinated, Ribbonetters, YinYangMessages, and Zigzaggy. Similar were letters on objects with mirror symmetry: ButterflyWings and OpenBook. Finally I did some typefaces that alternated top and bottom shapes: Bihext, Undulate, Undulated, Bannetters. This is, as far as I know, the biggest collection of these kinds of fonts anywhere.

BigStripesMono is available from fontspring and myfonts.

Five more alternating-letter font families

 I have found typefaces with alternating letter sets to be an almost empty niche in the typeface world and have been trying to fill it. From September into November  I worked on five more typefaces that use the OpenType feature of Contextual Alternatives (calt) to automatically alternate letter sets. Unlike many of my past efforts in which the sides of letters snuggle together, these five have vertical sides and the two sets of characters differ from each other on their tops and bottoms.

Bihext is based on a bisected hexagon. It comes in two styles, a filled and an outlined style.  It is available from myfonts and fontspring. 

The letters of Bannetters are formed on parallelograms, one set sloping downward to the right and the other sloping upward to the right. The result of alternating them is a zigzaggy string of words. Bannetters has two styles, one with squared edges and the other that rounds the outside of letters that are usually curved. It is available from fontspring.

A third typeface is Zigzaggy. It has letters on diamond-shaped parallelograms that are formed by trisecting a regular hexagon. It comes in four styles: black letters on blank shapes, blank letters on black shapes, and two that alternate these two possibilities. It is available from fontspring.

A fourth family is the wavy font family Undulate. One set of letters bulges upward and the other sets bulges downward. The result is wavy text or text that resembles a washboard road. It has two styles, a solid and an outlined style. It is available from myfonts and fontspring.

Finally, Undulated is also wavy but the peaks and valleys of the waves are at the right and left sides of the letters rather than in the middle as in Undulate. It seems to have a more chaotic appearance than Undulate, perhaps because its letters lack the symmetry that some of the letters in Undulate have. It is available from fontspring.

New font family: ZoidicFun

ZoidicFun is a typeface family that alternates two sets of letters. The letters are formed from a template of a trapezoid. Letters with wide tops alternate with letters with wide bottoms. Another font, PoultrySign, was also formed from a pattern of alternating trapezoidal letters, but those trapezoids were symmetric while those of ZoidicFun are asymmetric.

ZoidicFun has five weights and two orientations. An italics version of each weight is formed by flipping the templates over a vertical line. In the picture above, the second and fourth lines are italic styles.

ZoidicFun is hard to read and very tightly spaced to accentuate the way the letters tile together. The letters are monospaced, which makes the pattern of trapezoids more obvious. Notice that pairs of letters form rectangles. All of these attributes make the typeface stand out and command attention. It is useless for text but can be useful for when a short bit of text needs to draw attention, as in titles or advertising. It is available from fontspring.

Ovaltown

Ovaltown is a strange, bizarre typeface family in which the letters are derived from  ovals. It is unicase, but some of the letters on the lower-case keys have different shapes than their counterpart on the upper-case keys. It has limited uses and is too hard to read to be used as text.

The family has three weights and is available from Fontspring and MyFonts.

A family recently expanded with new weights and italics is Hermainita (8).

Mostly alternating characters

I stopped doing alternating-character fonts at the end of 2020 when I ran out of ideas. Recently I thought that alternating bottom-heavy letters with top-heavy letters might be interesting. I based the letter shapes on a distorted oval or egg shape, with the stoke narrowing at the narrow end and widening at the wide end. After doing two sets of letters based on the shapes of upper-case letters (A & B), I added two more sets based on lower-case shapes (c & d). These four sets of letters are arranged to form six different fonts, four of which are spaced for alternating character sets (AB, Ad, Bc, & cd). In the picture below, the first two lines are of the two sets of letters that do not alternate, one with the top-heavy characters (Ac) and the second with the bottom-heavy characters (Bd). The other four alternate the four sets of characters.

I considered doing outlined versions, but the narrow parts of the letters do not allow an interior. Instead I created an inset style for each of the six fonts that can be layered above the base font to create hollow or colored letters. They are shown in red in the picture above.

The result is a typeface family very different from any other that I am aware of. It is available at myfonts.com.

A large expansion

I designed Myhota in 1990; it was one of my earliest designs. The bold version was first, and then a thinner version followed. It is a condensed font with a very high x-height that makes it work better as a display font than a text font. I have long thought an expansion with additional weights was desirable and I finally got around to doing it. The end result was a much bigger family than I originally anticipated, with a total of nine weights plus italics plus backslanted styles for all weights. 

Because Myhota was not very useful for text, in the early 1990s I attempted to alter it by lowering its x-height and widening the letters to create something that would work as text. The result was MyhotaHatched. It also originally had two weights. In 2021 I added an intermediate weight and italics, giving the family 6 members.

Both are available from myfonts (here) and FontSpring (here and here).

The biggest yet

 Introducing JetJane, a family of 36 faces, the biggest family currently in the IngrimayneType collections.

JetJane is a geometric sans-serif family. The family has two widths and each width has nine weights. Each of these 18 fonts comes with an accompanying italics version, giving the family a total of 36 members.

JetJane, like other geometric sans faces, is plain, unadorned, and highly legible. It is derived from JetJaneMono, a monospaced sans-serif face. This development is unusual because one expects the monospaced variants to be  created after the proportional variant, if a monospaced variant is even produced. This development history results in some distinctive differences between JetJane and two other geometric sans faces from IngrimayneType, AndrewAndreas and Yassitf. Below AndewAndreas is on top, JetJane in the middle, and Yassitf on the bottom. All are printed at the same point size.

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

An expanded Dinner menu

One of the first novelty fonts I created was a font made of knives, spoons, and forks that I named Dinner. In the past few weeks I added three variants to make a family of four. One variant was composed only of forks, another only of spoons, and the third only of knives. Below the three new variants are illustrated above the orginal typeface.

The orginal Dinner had small caps in the lower-case slots. The three new family members have alternative forms of the letters in those slots and that can be seen in the "N"s in the picture.

The revised Dinner family is available from Fontspring and MyFonts.

JetJaneMono expands by condensing

 JetJaneMono is a family of sans-serif faces that are monospaced. In May the family underwent a large expansion with the addition of condensed-width styles, Below the original width is show in the first line and the condensed width in the second.

Twelve new condensed styles were added to the family. The new fonts had three weights: thin, regular, and bold. Each upright style had a corresponding italics style. Each of those six new fonts had a similar new font with the lower-case letters replaced with small caps. The text below shows all twelve of the new styles, with a different style in each line.

The revised and expanded JetJaneMono family is available at myfonts.com and fonstpring.com.

DinoTracks

 Over the years I have designed a number of letterbat fonts, fonts in which the letters are made up of objects such as feet, hands, safety pins, pipes, and bugs. In 2012 I tried to make one from dinosaur tracks but abandoned it because it just did not work.

Recently I published a maze book with a maze that had walls made of dinosaur footprints. To make this maze, I elongated the footprints from the unsuccessful font. I then realized that the narrower footprints would make much better letters than my attempt in 2012. The end result was DinoTracks.

DinoTracks is readable at small point sizes, though at small sizes seeing that the letters are made of footprints is difficult. It is available on FontSpring.

Existing font families that have been expanded in the past month or two include Rundigsburg (5), FiveOh (2), Porker (1), and Sergury (3).

Increasing color options in OakPark

I originally constructed the OakPark family in 1994 with seven family members. The fat stems invited decoration and four of the members had decorations on the stems, with one set on the upper-case keys and another on the lower-case keys. Only one member of the seven had true lower-case characters and two, one a shadowed style, had small caps on the lower-case keys. In 2018 I added an eighth style by separating out the inside of the shadowed style so it could be used in layers to provide color.

In March this year I revisited the family and did a major overhaul. I added an italics to the to go with the style that had true lower-case keys, and I added a plain or solid style to use in layers with the four decorated styles. However, the family had alternative shapes for over half of the letter forms, and the easiest way to make it all work was to take the four decorated styles and split them so each font had only one style of decoration in it. In the second row the first "A" shows the solid style, and the next eight show the decorated styles. I also added a hollow style because it could also be used in layers.

The picture below illustrates what can be done by using these fonts in layers. In the top line the solid style is red and forms the bottom layer. Above it in black is the decorated style. In the work "FUN" the hollow style is a top layer, also in red.

The word "WITH" has three layers, with the black solid font on the bottom, two decorated styles in the middle, and the hollow style on top. In the word "LAYERS" the last two letters have the solid style in red on the bottom and the hollow style in blue above it. 

Something new for 2021

 IngrimayneType's first new font for 2021 is now available on myfonts.com and fontspring.com. It is called BearAnark because it began with a blending of two old fonts, BearButteT and Anarckhie. It has five weights, each with an italic style. Like the two fonts that gave birth to it, it is slab serif and is best characterized as a display font, though it can be used for some text purposes. However, it has a lower x-height and is less compact than fonts commonly used as book or text fonts.

Below is a comparison of a few letters of BearButteT, Anarckhie, and BearAnark. You should be able to see influences of the first two on the third. The first two are considerably different and I was curious to see what a blending of the two would yield.

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Recent font families expanded by adding italic or oblique styles are PeterPierre (5) and Xaltid (2). Those expanded by adding new weights are KnewFont (3) and Handana (2). Families expanded by adding both new weights and italic/oblique styles are Quidic (3), Xahosch (4) LeakerorLeach (4), GrechenHello (4), Asterx (3), BetterEuroika (2), WalcomeOne (6), Argenta, (4), and RosarGrad (2). 

Thirteen more

I spent much of January on the computer improving typeface families that I created twenty to thirty years ago. Some of what I am doing is partially inspired by America's most prolific type designer, who recently reached 1700 typeface families. Most of his families have two styles, one an oblique. The oblique style makes the family more attractive and is very easy to add.

Getting oblique or italic styles in late January were the DavidFarewell, RundigPencil, and ArgentaBobbed families. 

Early in January SusiScript got oblique styles, but as I was working on posters for the family, I noticed that a bolder style, an extrabold, would be useful. 

Qwatick, a decorative serifed family, had two weights with a large gap between them. An intermediate weight seemed in order. With the addition of an italics for each weight, the family now has six members.

More obliques and italics

 While adding characters to fonts so that they will meet the Monotype minimum-character requirement, I decided to add some oblique styles because they are easy to do and they can make the family more useful. Recently added are obliques and italics to GalexicaMono, SusiScript, FebDrei, and Yahosch.

An oblique style simply slants the upright style with no changes in letter forms. The new styles of FebDrei and Yahosch qualify as italics rather than obliques. The new FedDrei styles alter the letters f and k  and the new Yahosch styles alter the letters a and f. 

The characters that are most commonly missing in the fonts I am updating include the copyright and registered symbols, the section symbol, and the multiplication sign. When I designed fonts more than twenty years ago, I did not think those characters and some others were important, so I often omitted them.

Additions and revivals

I initially intended only at add characters to the four fonts of WhichIt and WhichItTwo, which are quirky, geometric faces that have letter shapes based on a hexagon that has four sides of one length and the other two of a much longer length. They were not created with any purpose in mind but only to see what a set of letters based on this shape would look like. As I added characters, I noticed that there was a large gap between the regular and bold weights, so I constructed an intermediate weight that may be more usable than the two existing weights. Adding italics styles did not require much effort so I added them for all the weights. What started as a fairly minor expansion of characters ended up tripling the size of the family. In the picture below the new members of the family are shown in yellow.

One of the first typefaces I designed was a sans-serif face that briefly sold on a disk produced by a company called Educorp. It was a beginner's effort that was quickly retired. However, in the late 1990s, I ran it through a font-distortion program that "grunged" it up, hiding its many imperfections. As 2021 began I decided to revive it, adding many accented and other characters. TRGrunge is available from fontspring.

A spiky start to 2021

 For about ten years, from the early 1990s until 2002, I sold typefaces mostly on CDs. I designed typefaces for three CDs sold by the short-lived company Wayzata Technologies. After it folded, I published my own CD that include what had been on those three CDs plus a bit more. When the technology to cheaply burn CDs from a personal computer arrived, I added a CD of novelty fonts. This method of selling gave me an incentive to produce lots of typefaces and that incentive attracted me to a couple of font distortion programs that were published in the 1990s. I used one to produce about a dozen fonts with spikes or spines on the letters that were included on my novelty-font CD. 

In 2002 I learned of a better way of selling typefaces, through an on-line font vendor. I happily abandoned CDs, upgraded my typefaces where needed, and submitted most of them to myfonts.com and fonts.com. To start off 2021 I have resurrected seven spiked typefaces that I did not move to myfonts.com, renamed them, expanded them to include more accented characters, corrected problems I found, and generated the font files with FontLab 7 so they include some common OpenType features. I added four spiked fonts that I had moved to myfonts, renaming and expanding them as well. The resulting eleven typefaces make up the Kaktis collection on fontspring.com. Like all novelty fonts, they have limited uses but there can be situations in which one is just what is needed. 

It is remarkable how much digital type has changed since I started playing with it in the late 1980s. When I started the only PostScript I could make was Type 3, which did not have some features that Adobe kept for itself. In addition to the PostScript file, one needed a bitmap file so the type would be visible on the screen. Apple developed TrueType to do an end-run around Adobe, but Microsoft was the primary promoter of this new format. Then the OpenType format was introduced and almost entirely replaced old PostScript format. I suspect all the formats available now will be obsolete in 20 years.