Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Vasetters, another alternating-letter typeface family

Vasetters is a novelty font in which the letters are cut from the shape of a tessellating vase. To get the tessellating effect, the two sets of letters (and numbers and some symbols) must alternate, and this is done automatically in applications that support the OpenType feature of Contextual Alternatives (calt). Vasetters is monospaced and comes in two weights. The regular weight is tightly spaced, which should not be a problem at large point sizes. At small point sizes adjacent letters can be colored differently or the character spacing can be increased. The lighter weight can be used alone or layered above the regular weight to create the effect of hollow lettering. Vasetters is fun, bizarre, weird, and obviously a decorative display font.

Vasetters is available from myfonts and fontspring.

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

RensGazet

RensGazet is a decorative blackletter typeface with elaborate upper-case letters and condensed lower-case characters. It was inspired by the masthead of a short-lived weekly newspaper, The Rensselaer Gazette, which was published from 1857 until 1860. I could not find any existing digitized fonts that replicated this old typeface, so I decided to create an interpretation of it. I had samples of few letters in large point sizes and a number of others at a small point size, though these were blurry and not sharply defined. As a result, this typeface is undoubtedly considerably different from the original. Also, my spacing is much tighter than that in the source samples.

RensGazet is available from myfonts.com and fontspring.