Additions and revivals

I initially intended only at add characters to the four fonts of WhichIt and WhichItTwo, which are quirky, geometric faces that have letter shapes based on a hexagon that has four sides of one length and the other two of a much longer length. They were not created with any purpose in mind but only to see what a set of letters based on this shape would look like. As I added characters, I noticed that there was a large gap between the regular and bold weights, so I constructed an intermediate weight that may be more usable than the two existing weights. Adding italics styles did not require much effort so I added them for all the weights. What started as a fairly minor expansion of characters ended up tripling the size of the family. In the picture below the new members of the family are shown in yellow.

One of the first typefaces I designed was a sans-serif face that briefly sold on a disk produced by a company called Educorp. It was a beginner's effort that was quickly retired. However, in the late 1990s, I ran it through a font-distortion program that "grunged" it up, hiding its many imperfections. As 2021 began I decided to revive it, adding many accented and other characters. TRGrunge is available from fontspring.

A spiky start to 2021

 For about ten years, from the early 1990s until 2002, I sold typefaces mostly on CDs. I designed typefaces for three CDs sold by the short-lived company Wayzata Technologies. After it folded, I published my own CD that include what had been on those three CDs plus a bit more. When the technology to cheaply burn CDs from a personal computer arrived, I added a CD of novelty fonts. This method of selling gave me an incentive to produce lots of typefaces and that incentive attracted me to a couple of font distortion programs that were published in the 1990s. I used one to produce about a dozen fonts with spikes or spines on the letters that were included on my novelty-font CD. 

In 2002 I learned of a better way of selling typefaces, through an on-line font vendor. I happily abandoned CDs, upgraded my typefaces where needed, and submitted most of them to myfonts.com and fonts.com. To start off 2021 I have resurrected seven spiked typefaces that I did not move to myfonts.com, renamed them, expanded them to include more accented characters, corrected problems I found, and generated the font files with FontLab 7 so they include some common OpenType features. I added four spiked fonts that I had moved to myfonts, renaming and expanding them as well. The resulting eleven typefaces make up the Kaktis collection on fontspring.com. Like all novelty fonts, they have limited uses but there can be situations in which one is just what is needed. 

It is remarkable how much digital type has changed since I started playing with it in the late 1980s. When I started the only PostScript I could make was Type 3, which did not have some features that Adobe kept for itself. In addition to the PostScript file, one needed a bitmap file so the type would be visible on the screen. Apple developed TrueType to do an end-run around Adobe, but Microsoft was the primary promoter of this new format. Then the OpenType format was introduced and almost entirely replaced old PostScript format. I suspect all the formats available now will be obsolete in 20 years.

Final updates for 2020?

Trips sometimes have unexpected detours. The font posters for my small collection of calligraphic typefaces looked weak, so I decided to spend time attempting to improve them. Along the way I tested them as text for invitations and decided three of them might work better with a slant. As a result the Cuthbert, Balboat, and RosarGrad families grew.  The new italics are simply skewed or slanted versions of the regular styles and are shown in yellow below.

The poster displays are now better but still have room for improvement.

Revising JennerikInfml

JennerikInfml is a friendly, casual typeface family that has the appearance of neat hand printing. It began as the italics to Jennerik, but I ended up separating it and giving it a different set of upper-case letters. Although its lower-case letters were designed as italics, it was originally published in 1992 with three weights as upright letters without a slant or skew. This revision of 2020 makes a few corrections and additions to the existing three fonts and adds oblique or slanted styles.

It is available from myfonts.com and fontspring.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