Fontstructing since | 5th September, 2008 |
Fontstructions | 60 shared, 39 staff picks |
Shared Glyphs | 4219 |
Downloads | 10423 downloads made of this designer’s work |
Comments Made | 404 |
This font has been almost 3 years in the making. Mostly because how tedius it was to keep copying the same "bricks" over and over. I'm glad it is finished enough to share. I may or may not (most likely) add more glyphs later.
[Click Pixel in the font viewer, then click Shift+Pixel four times to view the font correctly]
I love it when fonts come together like this one.
It started as me thinking what can I do for the 'twenties' that isn't 1920s. (thalamic has done those before!). The idea that I was toying with was doing each letter on a grid of 20 parts (blocks, stripes, etc.). There is already a stripes font in development (which is unlikely to be shared any time soon). I thought maybe I could convert it to a 20 stripe version. But it's too optical illusion-y and requires blocks of free time at a stretch for me to visualize the letters, which I don't have. Then the idea came to just develop a new block that says 20 on it and use it as a pixel for some pixel font. Which led to thinking an XX is 20 in Roman numerals. So I thought develop a grid that reads XX in multiple ways and directions.
With that basic idea, I started tinkering with the fontstructor and soon realized that I will need a lot of bricks. That necessitated making custom X and O bricks. That gave rise to the basic grid block of 7x7 grid that can be used as something that can be "carved" to form various letters. Better in theory than practice. M is OK, but a 7 brick wide A is just too wide. Plus the larger Xs were too white. Had to create more custom bricks to take away some of the whiteness that left the X still visible. These additional custom bricks were cumbersome to make...mainly because of my limited ability to visualize which brick placed where in a 4x4 grid will create what shape but also because I was using quarter brick corner triangles which meant that each brick of the 4x4 grid was internally a 2x2 grid as well. So a 8x8 grid really with 64 internal smaller bricks. Some bricks required making a custom brick and then merging it with another custom brick several times over to have the correct custom brick. Of course, I didn't know if the pain-stakingly created custom brick will be appropriate or not.
Much experimentation later, finally figured out what to do with this idea. Once all the custom bricks were created and the basic look of the font developed, then it was just a matter of placing the bricks in the right place. Often times not even that as one letter was just a modified version of another letter...like D and 3 are just a modified B; L and F are modified E, etc.
This was supposed to be a joke entry that didn't take much time to make. It's still a joke entry not to be taken seriously...but it did take time...and provided puzzle-like geometric challenge to overcome. Very fun.
How could I not love fontstruct!?