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.

A large expansion

I designed Myhota in 1990; it was one of my earliest designs. The bold version was first, and then a thinner version followed. It is a condensed font with a very high x-height that makes it work better as a display font than a text font. I have long thought an expansion with additional weights was desirable and I finally got around to doing it. The end result was a much bigger family than I originally anticipated, with a total of nine weights plus italics plus backslanted styles for all weights. 

Because Myhota was not very useful for text, in the early 1990s I attempted to alter it by lowering its x-height and widening the letters to create something that would work as text. The result was MyhotaHatched. It also originally had two weights. In 2021 I added an intermediate weight and italics, giving the family 6 members.

Both are available from myfonts (here) and FontSpring (here and here).

The biggest yet

 Introducing JetJane, a family of 36 faces, the biggest family currently in the IngrimayneType collections.

JetJane is a geometric sans-serif family. The family has two widths and each width has nine weights. Each of these 18 fonts comes with an accompanying italics version, giving the family a total of 36 members.

JetJane, like other geometric sans faces, is plain, unadorned, and highly legible. It is derived from JetJaneMono, a monospaced sans-serif face. This development is unusual because one expects the monospaced variants to be  created after the proportional variant, if a monospaced variant is even produced. This development history results in some distinctive differences between JetJane and two other geometric sans faces from IngrimayneType, AndrewAndreas and Yassitf. Below AndewAndreas is on top, JetJane in the middle, and Yassitf on the bottom. All are printed at the same point size.

JetJane is available from myfonts.com and fontspring.com.

An expanded Dinner menu

One of the first novelty fonts I created was a font made of knives, spoons, and forks that I named Dinner. In the past few weeks I added three variants to make a family of four. One variant was composed only of forks, another only of spoons, and the third only of knives. Below the three new variants are illustrated above the orginal typeface.

The orginal Dinner had small caps in the lower-case slots. The three new family members have alternative forms of the letters in those slots and that can be seen in the "N"s in the picture.

The revised Dinner family is available from Fontspring and MyFonts.

JetJaneMono expands by condensing

 JetJaneMono is a family of sans-serif faces that are monospaced. In May the family underwent a large expansion with the addition of condensed-width styles, Below the original width is show in the first line and the condensed width in the second.

Twelve new condensed styles were added to the family. The new fonts had three weights: thin, regular, and bold. Each upright style had a corresponding italics style. Each of those six new fonts had a similar new font with the lower-case letters replaced with small caps. The text below shows all twelve of the new styles, with a different style in each line.

The revised and expanded JetJaneMono family is available at myfonts.com and fonstpring.com.

DinoTracks

 Over the years I have designed a number of letterbat fonts, fonts in which the letters are made up of objects such as feet, hands, safety pins, pipes, and bugs. In 2012 I tried to make one from dinosaur tracks but abandoned it because it just did not work.

Recently I published a maze book with a maze that had walls made of dinosaur footprints. To make this maze, I elongated the footprints from the unsuccessful font. I then realized that the narrower footprints would make much better letters than my attempt in 2012. The end result was DinoTracks.

DinoTracks is readable at small point sizes, though at small sizes seeing that the letters are made of footprints is difficult. It is available on FontSpring.

Existing font families that have been expanded in the past month or two include Rundigsburg (5), FiveOh (2), Porker (1), and Sergury (3).

Increasing color options in OakPark

I originally constructed the OakPark family in 1994 with seven family members. The fat stems invited decoration and four of the members had decorations on the stems, with one set on the upper-case keys and another on the lower-case keys. Only one member of the seven had true lower-case characters and two, one a shadowed style, had small caps on the lower-case keys. In 2018 I added an eighth style by separating out the inside of the shadowed style so it could be used in layers to provide color.

In March this year I revisited the family and did a major overhaul. I added an italics to the to go with the style that had true lower-case keys, and I added a plain or solid style to use in layers with the four decorated styles. However, the family had alternative shapes for over half of the letter forms, and the easiest way to make it all work was to take the four decorated styles and split them so each font had only one style of decoration in it. In the second row the first "A" shows the solid style, and the next eight show the decorated styles. I also added a hollow style because it could also be used in layers.

The picture below illustrates what can be done by using these fonts in layers. In the top line the solid style is red and forms the bottom layer. Above it in black is the decorated style. In the work "FUN" the hollow style is a top layer, also in red.

The word "WITH" has three layers, with the black solid font on the bottom, two decorated styles in the middle, and the hollow style on top. In the word "LAYERS" the last two letters have the solid style in red on the bottom and the hollow style in blue above it.