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.

New Font: BrightIdeas

A few years ago I did a maze in a maze book that used lightbulbs for cells. This lightbulb pattern seemed appropriate for another typeface in which there are two sets of characters that alternate. I derived the letters on the bulbs from an early sans-serif typeface of mine, Myhota-Bold. A sample of the result, called BrightIdeas, is shown below. BrightIdeas has two family members, one that has outlined bulbs and one with solid bulbs. They can be used in layers for added color.

BrightIdeas is available at fontspring.com.

New font family: Vinetters

Vinetters has letters on the alternating leaves of a vine. It is monospaced and uses the OpenType contextual alternatives (calt) feature to alternate leaves as the vine snakes its way across the page, putting leaves with the base down between leaves with the base up. The family has two styles, one with transparent leaves and the other with solid leaves, and these two styles can be used in layers to add color. The characters on the leaves are derived from the typeface IngrianaCasual.

Vinetters is another in a series of font families that is using contextual alternatives to alternate between two sets of letters. The two sets are complementary and neither by itself has much appeal.

Vinetters is available from FontSpring and myfonts.

Also now on FontSpring is FattyPants, a reworking of the odd font Onyon.

28 more

The Zimric family simulates neat hand printing. It is a large family, with 28 members. It has condensed, narrow, and regular widths and each width has four or five weights. Each width/weight has both an upright and an italic style.

A number of my type designs have come from playing with previous designs, either making them more extreme or trying to make them more legible. The lettering I designed for Coffinated invited development. It was sans serif and quite simple. A first spinoff is the monoline Zimric family, which I considered naming Decoffinated.

It is available on fontspring.com and myfonts.

Revisions to Skagwae

I have added two new members to the Skagwae family and also changed names to reduce menu clutter. Skagwae comes in monospaced and proportional styles and each has a regular and a bold weight. A fifth member of the family is a distorted version of SkagwayMono-Regular. The two bold weights are new.

The characters of four members of the Skagwae family have no curves, just straight line segments. The letter shapes themselves are fairly standard, but the choppy line segments used to construct them give the fonts a crude, unfinished look that is highlighted at large point sizes. At small point sizes the fonts are surprisingly legible.

Skagwae is now also available at fontspring.com, with the monospaced styles separated from the proportional styles.

I have also revised several other fonts, mostly by adding accented characters used in Central and Eastern European languages. Included are Heptagroan, BaumSquiggle, Dinner,  Pencil, Teethee, TapedUp, Rumpled, Tinkerer, and Bluster and made some minor changes to AbagailJackson and Uueirdie.

Revivals

I have revived three old type families that I had abandoned for many years. They were all hybrids, that is, they were created by blending versions of other fonts that I had constructed. They were not created to serve any purpose but rather were the result of my curiosity. Fontographer had been given the ability to blend two existing fonts (which can be very useful for creating different widths and weights) and I wanted to see what would happen if I fed the blending process various fonts.

Some of the results were attractive and some less so. The fonts created by blending in KampFriendship, a hand-drawn font with serifs, seemed less pleasing than other blends, so I set them aside when I began to list fonts on myfonts.com. However, they are very legible at small point sizes and someone somewhere may find a use for them. I have cleaned them up (blending can leave a lot of oddities, especially when mixing two quite different fonts) and added new styles to two of them. They are now available on fontspring.com

Examples of the three font families are shown below with a sample from the plain and bold-italics styles. The font families are, from top to bottom, EuroikaKamp, BetterKamp, and KampIngriana. For more information, follow the links.

More Fontspring revivals

Three more IngrimayneType revivals have been added to fonts offered by Fontspring.com.

XAabced and JasperSqueese are two text fonts with five and six family members respectively. XAabced was an very early attempt to design a readable text font. The two were eventually blended via the merging option of Fontographer to produce JabcedHy, which seems to be superior to both and as a result, the two parent fonts were never added to the font collection at Myfonts.com.

RoundWhy is the result of blending or merging two fonts with reverse contrast, Roundup and WyomingSpaghetti. Roundup has round serifs and WyomingSpaghetti square serifs, so RoundWhy has rounded serifs that are not nearly as rounded as those in RoundUp. For this revival the accented characters used in Eastern European languages were added.

FontSpring revivals

IngrimayneType has had a few fonts listed at FontSpring since 2015. Recently I have added most of the rest of the Ingrimayne Collection to the site. Included are several oldies that I had retired. One revival is Bouncer, which may have been the first typeface I designed. I designed a version not in Fontographer but with a freeware or shareware bitmap editor in the late 1980s and then did a PostScript version when I purchased Fontographer.

 IanSegoe was an early attempt at a medieval-looking typeface. Preliminary versions were named Laudens. I think Benescriptine is a more successful medieval-looking typeface but this earlier effort may fit some needs.

 I have put letters on a number of things, including bowling pins, coffee cups, placards, buttons, Christmas ornaments, teapots, and even railroad cars. Stamper put them on stamps.

Monospaced fonts are an interesting challenge because wide letters and narrow letters fit are given the same space. With the demise of the typewrite, there is little use for them, but they still are fun to design. FeggoliteMono was an attempt to push the limits of what a monospaced typeface could look like. Long ago I did a variation that lessened its weirdness but gave it a slant. For some reason I never did a version without a slant until I added FeggoliteUpright at Fontspring.

These four all have limited uses and all are priced at the minimum price allowed on Fontspring, which is $5.00. The other typefaces I am adding have prices based on what they are on Myfonts.com.