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.

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.

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.