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.

Ovaltown

Ovaltown is a strange, bizarre typeface family in which the letters are derived from  ovals. It is unicase, but some of the letters on the lower-case keys have different shapes than their counterpart on the upper-case keys. It has limited uses and is too hard to read to be used as text.

The family has three weights and is available from Fontspring and MyFonts.

A family recently expanded with new weights and italics is Hermainita (8).

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.