Updating AndrewAndreas

In 1994 I designed AndrewAndreas, an all-purpose sans-serif face useful for both text and display. It was a low-contrast family with three weights, a regular, a bold, and an extra-bold. At the time a three-weight family was not unusually sparse, but today it is for a legible sans. Hence, it was time for an update, adding more weights and also oblique styles, because sometimes text calls for italics and modern word processors do not fake italics in the way that some ancient programs did. The new AndrewAndreas family has twelve members in six weights, each with an oblique style. In the picture below the original members are show in white.

The oblique styles simply slant the upright styles and do not change the letter forms. However, these style (except for the black-oblique style) contain three sets open-type stylistic alternatives that can make the oblique styles look more like true italics by altering letters a, f, i j, and l, as illustrated below.

In 2019 I created a 30-font family of sans-serif faces called Yassitf that was also intended to be a versatile family useful for both text and display. Below is a comparison of it and AndrewAndreas, with AndrewAndreas first and Yassitf below it. Two weights are used for the comparison. There are many small differences.

The revised AndrewAndreas family is available on myfonts and fontspring.

TessieSomeMore

TessieSomeMore is a new typeface of tessellations in the Tessie series. Like the previous 18 members, it consists of two styles, a solid style that must be properly colored to be useful and an outlined style that can be used alone or in a layer over the solid style.

Most of the tessellations are Escher-like, that is, they resemble real-world objects such as insects (16), birds (11), animals (6), other objects or symbols (4). Another ten are not Escher-like but are geometric or abstract shapes that are visually appealing.

Most were designed with the aid of Tesselmaniac!. A few resemble shapes in previous Tessie fonts but were different enough that I included them. The tessellations include 27 different items from the Grünbaum and Shepard classification and eleven from the Heesch classification.

TessieSomeMore is available at myfonts.

(See also this post at mazepuzzles.blogpspot.com.)

Kwalett

After expanding the Qualettee family, I wondered if the thinnest member could be used to build a sans-serif family with low contrast that would work better than Qualettee for blocks of text. The result is a ten font family that I named Kwalett. It inherits the large x-height from Qualettee.

The picture below shows Kwalett at the top and Yassitf, another sans-serif face that works well for text, below. Kwalett was printed at 35 points and Yassitf at 33 and then both enlarged.

Below shows the difference between Kwalett and Qualettee. Most letters have a similar shape, but the differences in contrast make them easy to differentiate.

Kwalett is available from myfonts.

Expanding Qualettee

Qualettee is a stressed sans-serif family that was originally constructed in 1994 with three family members. In July of 2020 I expended it to ten members, adding semibold and extrabold weights and italics to all five weights. I also made minor changes and additions to the original three members. In the picture below, the original members are shown in white and the new members in yellow.

Qualettee is available at myfonts and fontspring.

Revising Quatsity

Many years ago, in 1995, I blended together two fonts, a typeface very similar to Kwersity (with low contrast) and one similar to Qwatick (with high contrast). The result I called Quatsity. Below Quatsity is in the middle, Kwersity on top, and Qwatick on the bottom.

The results were interesting but I did not feel like doing the significant work needed to get bold or italics versions. When I put my font library on myfonts.com, I did not include Quatsity, but when Fontspring.com came calling, I added its one face to their offerings.

This year I have been expanding families and I decided to see what I could do with Quatsity. I ended up expanding it to a family of eight. Below the original, now the light style, is in white and the new regular, semibold, and bold styles as well as the four new italic styles are shown in yellow. The larger family should make this design much more useable.

Quatsity is a squarish or boxy serifed font with rounded corners. Is is suitable for titles or signage and legible enough for small blocks of text. It is available on myfonts and fontspring.

Additions to Cennerik, NewNerdish, Eyebel, Dschoyphul, and Grundee families

Cennerik was an early font from IngrimayneType, designed in 1992. It had three weights: plain, bold, and extrabold. The 2020 revision adds two new weights and oblique styles, boosting the family from three members to ten. One of the new styles was between the former bold and extrabold. This became the new bold, with the former bold being renamed as semi-bold.

There were also a few corrections and additions to the original styles. In this and the following pictures, new styles are in yellow and original styles are in white.

NewNerdish is sans serif with a squarish look.  Designed in 1994, it now has four weights instead of three and each of the four weights has a new oblique style.

Eyebel is another square sans-serif, one with only straight lines. It was designed in 1997 and was an experiment to see how a font could be formed with simple straight lines. It started with two weights and the revision adds three weights between the original two as well as five oblique styles.

An oblique style skews or slants the original style. A true italics changes the shape of some of the letters, especially the lower-case letters.

Dschoyphul and Grundee are sloppy serifed fonts with only one weight. Adding  an oblique style to each was simple and may make them more useable.

Dschoyphul and Grundee were designed in 1995. They were attempts to design a rough, irregular serifed face that was still easy to read at small point sizes.

An eclectic sans serif

In the fall of 2019 I created a Yassitf, a family of 30 sans-serif faces. This year, 2020, I have created a second large sans-serif family, again with 30 faces. While Yassitf was an attempt at a generic face, one that had nothing that stood out to call attention to itself, this new face, Samsheriff, is noticeably different from other sans-serif faces. Putting a sample of it into the What-the-Font engine at myfonts.com reveals no other face that closely resembles it.

Below is a comparison between Yassitf and Samsheriff. While a quick glance may suggest they look similar, a closer comparison of letters shows that they are very different. To make this comparison, Yassitf was sized at 26 points and Samsheriff at 33.

Samsheriff's is the result of reworking the lettering used in Coffinated, a novelty font that had only upper-case letters. Alterations and many additions resulted in Zimric, a hand-drawn face. Zimric was close to being sans-serif, and making additional changes resulted in Samsheriff.

Samsheriff is legible and suitable for text or display. It joins a very crowded field; there is a huge number of well-designed sans serif typefaces already available and more are added each month.

Samsheriff is available at myfonts.com.