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.

Two more alternating-characters fonts

In February and March I added teo more alternating-character fonts, fonts that are designed to alternate two sets of characters. Weaving could be considered a condensed version of Woven, though it does not have the tessellation properties of Woven. It comes in three styles, a thin, regular, and outline. The outline style was designed to fit over the regular style in a layer. Weaver is available from fontspring and myfonts.

FangsALot is a family of nine faces. The template shape on which all are based is a distorted triangle that resembles a curved tooth or a fang. The shape has four orientations from flipping and two are used for regular style and two for an italics style. Midway between these styles is an isosceles triangle and it is used for a third style. I did not think the fang motif came through clearly in these three fonts so decided to fill the fang shape with simple sans-serif characters and then reverse colors to allow layers. FangsALot is available from fontspring and myfonts.

Four more for 2022

Typefaces with alternating characters have a tiny niche market. Because no one else has filled it, I decided I would. So far in 2022 I have released five typeface families into this niche, including the four below.

LoveDuets is similar to YinYangMessages and ButterflyWings in that it fills a single image with two letters. One set of characters fills the left side of a heart and the other set fills the right side. The OpenType feature of Contextual Alternatives does this automatically in applications that support it. There are several typefaces that put letters on hearts, but they all put one letter on one heart. The LoveDuets family has two styles that can be used in layers. It is available from fontspring and myfonts.

I started IMPuzzled a couple years ago but shelved it as I worked on other typefaces. This year I finally finished this family that puts letters on interlocking puzzle pieces. I have found one other font with letters on puzzle pieces, but its pieces are all identical. IMPuzzled has two styles and is available from Fontspring.

Woven was the first typeface I designed intentionally using a shape that tessellates as a framework in which to form letters. Like Woven, Billowed uses the framework of a simple tessellation pattern to form letters. Both Woven and Billowed can create lettering with a wave or ripple both horizontally and vertically. Woven has two styles and Billowed four. I have not seen any other typeface that resembles these faces. Billowed is available here and Woven here.

For the complete catalog of my alternating letter fonts, see here.

SlipperyFishes

In later 2021 I used alternating letters to give a line of text a wave. (See Undulate.) I realized that instead of having the waves on the top and bottom parallel to each other, I could have them reflect each other. This design idea gave birth to SlipperyFishes. The strange name came about because the look of a line of text reminded me of a slippery fish.

SlipperyFishes is monospaced with tight letter spacing to accentuate the ripple pattern. The family has four members: regular, outlined, condensed, and condensed outlined. The outline styles that can be used in a layer with their base styles to add color. 

Slipperyfishes is available from myfonts and fontspring.

A completely unrelated note: Myfonts listed their top 25 new fonts from 2021. The list includes 18 sans serif faces, 6 seriffed faces, and 1 script face.

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.

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.

Letters almost kissing

 Earlier this year I used the OpenType feature of contextual alternatives to alternate letter shapes that snuggled together such as letters based on trapezoids or concave/convex shapes. In October I wondered if I could do better with concave/convex lettering than I had done in Lentzers and set out to design a font with greater curvature and much tightly letter spacing. The result is the three-font family of CloseTogether.

CloseTogether has three weights: regular, bold, and extrabold. Some of the letter shapes look strange in isolation but take the form they do so they fit as concave or convex shapes. This is a typeface that is definitely not appropriate when readability is desired.

If the user finds the letter spacing too tight, the user can alter it with character spacing. The user can also change the character spacing and turn off the contextual alternatives to use just one set of the characters.

 CloseTogether is available from fontspring and myfonts.

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.

A return to calt

In May I bid farewell to calt. In November I welcomed it back.

ButterflyWings and OpenBook are two new typeface families that use the Opentype feature of contextual alternatives (calt) to alternate two sets of characters. Earlier in 2020 I designed several typeface using this feature, but they alternated sets of characters that fit together such as convex and concave blocks. In these new faces the alternating sets are two sides of a symmetrical object, in one case open books and the other butterfly wings. I am unaware of anyone else who has done typefaces similar to these. 

OpenBook is a one-font family. The ButterflyWings family has two members, solid and outlined, that can be used in layers to add color.

ButterflyWings and OpenBook are available at fontspring.com

A farewell to calt?

Coffinated features letters on coffins. It may be my farewell, at least for a while, to the use of the OpenType calt feature to alternate letter sets.

Coffinated is monospaced and macabre. Its two styles can be used in layers for added color. (See picture above.) It is not a happy face with many uses but it might be appropriate for Halloween or the Day of The Dead.

Unlike Vinetters, Eggad, and BrightIdeas, three other fonts with alternating character sets on objects, the letters used in Coffinated were not taken from a earlier typeface but specifically designed for this font family.

Coffinated is available on FontSpring.

More fun with calt: Snuggels

For the past couple of months I have been playing with typefaces that use alternating letter sets, in part because I found a way to have an OpenType feature alternate the letters automatically. My latest typeface family of alternating letter sets, which I named Snuggels, emphasizes the tightness with which these alternating letters sets fit together.

The first font of the four began as a set of hexagons and a set of hourglass shapes that fit between two hexagons. Keeping the original outlines as much as possible, I carved out parts of these shapes to make letters. Each set of letters is by itself awkward and not very attractive. They only come to life and are interesting when they are mixed together, with letters from each set between letters from the other set.

It is always fun to see what other family members can be spun from one font. A thinner or lighter version was quite easy to create, though I do not like it nearly as much as the original. Then I realized that I could also do a version using only lower-case-letter shapes. This version does not have ascenders or descenders and that is a bit startling.

This is a typeface that screams "Notice me" to the reader. It is definitely not useful for body text.

Snuggels is available at myfonts.

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.

New font family: Hexonu

My recent font releases have featured alternative letter sets. PoultySign and Caltic have alternate letters sets based on trapezoids. Lentzers alternates letter sets based on concave and convex lenses. Another pair of shapes that will snuggle together are convex and concave hexagons and they form the basis of the typeface family Hexonu. However, the base hexagon is not one with both vertical and horizontal symmetry but rather a lopsided hexagon that takes the classic coffin shape.

Hexonu is a family of three variants, each with two weights. The patterns of the three variants are shown below.

Below are samples of each of the six styles. I originally intended to create only the first two variants but then realized that a font formed from flipping coffin shapes might be more useful and perhaps more appealing then the originals.

This typefaces was an experiment and I was not sure what the end result would be. It is monospaced and its uses are limited to situations where a large point size as well as quirkiness and weirdness are needed.

The alternating letters can be voided by turning off the contextual alternative feature. If you are using a program that does not support contextual alternatives, the alternating sets will not appear automatically but will have to be created by manually alternating upper and lower case keys. If you do not use the alternating letters, you may also want to adjust character spacing.

New font family: Caltic

The fonts of the Caltic family have letters that snuggle together. The letter shapes Caltic-Festival and Caltic-Holiday are based on trapezoids with curved sides, each with one set of letters with the long edge of the trapezoid on the top and the other with the long edge on the bottom. The sample below shows Caltic-Festival regular and wide in top two lines and Caltic-Holiday regular and wide in the third and fourth lines. The bottom two lines illustrate Caltic-Straight regular and wide, in which the trapezoids have straight sides. When letters from the two sets alternate, the result is very bold, eye-catching text suitable for posters and titles.

The family name comes from the OpenType feature calt, a feature that sets contextual alternatives. With it one does not have to type first an upper-case key and then a lower-case key. The feature tells word processors that support it to automatically switch from upper to lower case and back.

The font reminds me of hand-drawn lettering that was done on posters and signs during the hippie era of the 1960s and 1970s, though I can find nothing quite like it. However, my inspiration for it is older, in a newspaper from 1932 that led to the typeface family PoultySign. Caltic (and Lentzers) are the result of searching for other possible ways to use the insight that sprang from that 1932 newspaper.

Caltic is now available on myfonts and fontspring.

New fonts: Eggad and Ribbonetter

I continue to search for ways to create interesting typefaces that use alternating letter sets. Two new efforts are Eggad and Ribbonetter. Eggad has letters in eggs and the contextual alternatives feature of OpenType alternates big-bottomed eggs with little-bottomed eggs. Eggad comes in hollow and solid styles and the two can be used in layers to create colored eggs, as the example shows.

Ribbonetter alternates letters in ovals with letters in a shape that connects the ovals.

I have not found anyone else who is using the contextual alternative feature in the way I am and that is a reason that I continue to search for more ideas for alternating letter sets.

In both of these typefaces, the alternating letters can be voided by turning off the contextual alternative feature. If you are using a program that does not support contextual alternatives, the alternating sets will not appear automatically but will have to be created by alternating upper and lower case keys.

Ribbonetter  and Eggad are available on fontspring.com.

New font: Lentzers

Earlier this year I constructed PoultrySign, a typeface in which two sets of letters fit together by interlocking. In PoultrySign, both sets of letters were trapezoidal, one with big bottoms and the other with big tops.

Looking for other possibilities for alternating letters, I realized that convex and concave shapes will snuggle together, and from that realization came a new typeface, Lentzers. As I worked on it, I discovered that instead of having the user switch between upper and lower-case keys, aS iN tHiS pHrAsE, I could have that process automated with an OpenType feature called calt, or contextual alternatives. The calt feature tells the word processor that when it sees two upper-case letters together, it should change the second to lower-case and when it sees two lower-case letters together, it should switch the second to upper-case. You can see the result in the picture below in which concave-shaped letters alternate with convex-shaped letters.

Lentzers comes in three weights, light, regular, and bold. It is all caps or perhaps it should be classified as unicase. If one wants to use only the convex letter or only the concave letters, one can do that by turning off the contextual alternative feature. (This assumes that the word processor supports contextual alternatives. Most new ones will.)

I searched myfonts.com for similar typefaces that alternate letter shapes in this way. I found one, but it does not use the calt feature to make the alterations automatic.

Also, I revised PoultySign by adding the same calt feature used in Lentzers.

PoultrySign

Looking through microfilm of old issues of my local paper, I found this headline in a 1932 issue.

I could not recall seeing another typeface in which trapezoidal letters fit together like this and decided to create one. I ended up with a family of six faces that I named PoultrySign. The one that most closely resembles the text that inspired me is shown below:

To get the effect above, one alternates upper- and lower-case letters.

The font family has thin, regular, and bold weights in both regular width and condensed width versions. Because the typefaces are monospaced so that each character has the same width, the three styles can be used in layers to create two or three-colored type. 

I cannot think of a use I might have for it, but it was fun to create and for someone somewhere it may be just right.

I also updated several old typefaces by making a few corrections and adding a lot of extra characters, mostly accented letters used in Central and Eastern European languages. They include Twigglee, NoPain, Onyon, ForTheBirds, and Bumbershoot.