Wednesday, August 25, 2021

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.

Thursday, August 5, 2021

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).