Sunday, July 17, 2022

Complements, not compliments


 In the typeface family "Complements" two sets of characters complement each other, so much so that they work together much better than they work separately. The two sets are designed to alternate and this alternating is done automatically in applications that support the OpenType feature Contextual Alternatives. Complements is purely for show and display; it is a horrible choice for text. The spacing is very tight, which works well for very large point sizes. At smaller point sizes the user may want to increase character spacing. The typeface is monospaced. If the spacing between words is too large, substitute the non-breaking space (or the underscore) for the space character. Complements is geometric, bizarre, and hard to read, all characteristics that catch the reader's attention.

Complements comes in two styles, regular and outline. The outline style was designed to be used in a layer over the regular style. It is available from myfonts and fontspring.

Monday, July 11, 2022

Another smooth blend

 Flyoika is a slab serif family with a fairly low x-height, long ascenders, and considerable contrast. The family has five weights, each with an italics and it can be used for either display or text.

Flyoika was not designed to meet a particular need but rather out of curiosity. Years ago I had designed two slab serif families, FlyHigh and Euroika, that I recently noticed had a lot of similarities and I wondered what a blend of the two would look like.  Several corresponding characters in the two families are considerably different and in cleaning up the results, I usually opted for simplicity. The name "Flyoika" reflects these origins.

Flyoika is available from Fontspring and Myfonts.  

In addition to two new text families released recently, I have expanded five other families: BetterTypeRight (9 to 12), Xabced (5 to 7), JasperSqueeze  (6 to 10), EuroikaKamp  (4 to 8), & BetterEuroika (6 to 8).