EPOCH - Modern light-weight geometric display sans
───── 「 MEASURES 」
(in grid units)
X-Height: 1
Cap-Height: 2
Descent: 1
Optical Corrections: None
Stroke: 1/8 th
4-Em / 0.125 : 1-Stroke (0.125 ≍ 1/8 th)
― No filters used.
───── 「 SUMMARY 」
This is yet another deep dive into the very small and tiny quantum realm of FontStruct's small grid and light-weight stokes.
Unlike some of my previous endeavours into this dark corner of the FS-editor, which could have dizzying complexity in forms, this project for once didn't stress the sh....*t out of me by stretching the limits for my capabilities beyond what is still comfortable this time. Nor did it drain every last frigging bit of my knowledge or clever creative insight to pull it off.
On the contrary,
For once it remained largely a pretty straight forward and easy project in terms of forms and geometry. The absence for most of the 'bar-raising' features such as diagonal forms, rounded, transitions or stroke modulation made this 'FontStruction' that much more easy.
And when metaphorically breaking it down to the bare naked form and necessities, this design mainly consist of FS's (default)-brick set, resized modifications of those, combined with a set of stacked composites.
There a still a number of things I'd rather seen differently, and will see later attempts at making improvement, but taken in a broad perspective most of the included material so far look pretty fine to me already. And to point out one of the things that is still bugging actually are the 'accented' letters.
Some glyphs have odd values for their 'character'-width, and this makes it impossible to achieve 'grid to em-square'-bounding box allignement in FS's editor. So accents in these asymmetrical values look slightly ofset.
― "Changing character widths to nearest even value is simply far too destructive to the stylish characteristics of the fonts appearance"
───── 「 ABOUT THE FONT 」
In the end it became a pretty cool looking light-weight geometric modernist sans-serif style that at the same time has strong hints of Art-Deco-style lettering as well.
And apart from the minor things it fell short with, I think there is a lot about its overall character-set design and forms that is looking pretty darn rad actually if you ask me.
Content-wise the font is a single case design in a 'all-caps' or Majuscule style. The (Lc)-string was kept empty for deliberately for the technical reason of preserving all the (default)-blank metrics data for any further design updates.
───── 「 WHATS INSIDE 」
A little bit of everything...
■ Body text formatting:
□ Basic-Latin based character set with accented letters & numerals
□ Most punctuation marks
□ Numerous symbols
■ Decorative formatting
□ Pictorial attributes
□ Repeating patterns
───── 「 THE END 」
Let me know what you think so far,
Cheers
ARS NOUVEAUX - Art Nouveau inspired display typeface
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A personal digital reimagination of the lettering style by "Charles Rennie Mackintosh" (1868-1928), a pioneer of the "Glasgow School of Art" and so called "Arts & Crafts" movement.
His distinctive style of lettering has been seen many revisions, revivals, reimaginations and inspired designs alike over the years, and has evolved into a broad collection of available fonts.
This basic stylistic lettering concept from Mackintosh sort-of losely funcioned as the structural guiding principle for the creation of "Ars-Nouveaux".
This FontStruction is an experimentation into creating similar flavored, but still unique letterforms within that same design framework.
First I started to layout the overall basic asymmetrical core geometry from a set of custom rectangles, half arc's and slants for each of the letters bare skeleton shape. Once I completed the full set of 36 glyphs [a/z, 0/9] These basic shaped were then further modified into more sophisticated finalized letterforms.
Caps-only, but with many alternates, accompanied by a set of ornate initials.
Hope you like it,
Cheers
This is a cloneFORMALISMS - Modernist inline display type
Rigid square-based inlined modernist display style with incised (fake-) 3D effect, mimicing a quirky and non-logical take on twisted geometric form and sometimes folded appearance.
Some characters, but mainly symbols still need slight improvements, some are still missing as well.
The bi-linear stroke was incised at certain specific positions and had one or more (cross-)intersecting line segment included that connect the two colinear strokes. This is creating 2 additional extra geometric hyper-planes, and allows the option of including the illusion of looking at three-dimensional geometric objects.
But the way this is implemented into the design in fact obeys no relationship to any actual fundamental propeties and isn't necessarily a correct three-dimensional form, nor fully or faithfuly folded.
The glyphs also have somewhat of a monogram logo style quality
Hope you like it
Cheers
STF_SKYR SLAB - A modern slab serif design.
First of all, Hi everyone,
I hope you all doing great...
Seems that for now I have found my way back here, after being away from Fontstruct for nearly 2 years.
I got to admit that I experienced some ring rust at first. lol
Anyway, here is my latest fontstruction, the first one in 2 years.
So far the main design concept and the basic minimum glyph set is about completed, and I am pretty pleased with the result up untill this point.
More technical details on the design and concept as well as demo gfx can be found down in the comment section.
I hope you like it too so far
Cheers
MOVIEMAX — Groovy bold & roundish 70s display sans
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Moviemax is a bold display sans-serif that has a groovy 70s offbeat look. Essentially an all-caps lettering concept with simple looking letters. The basic geometry and inversed contrast with its soft rounded finish create an immediate endearing effect.
The default characterset comes as all-caps (unicase) only, with no glyph alternative forms. It has been completed with additional symbols and punctuation marks.
To make thing a little more interresting I have also included a full (A-Z) alphabet set of small-caps letter modifications with drastically altered proportions. Complete removal of the inversed stressed contrast to make a more simplified and cleaner looking minimalist letter style. Their size was also reduced to 50% of the cap-height (scale ratio ≈ 1:2), providing an optional alternative for the missing lowercase forms in the font.
To finished off this extra set of small capital letters, another additional full (A-Z) alphabet set of large capital letters was included. These letters have also been scaled down a bit to better fit with the small capital letter set (scale ratio ≈ 6:8 or 75% of cap-height).
The 2 sets include a slight more unique and stylized level of sophisticated characteristics to the font, and when used combined together in a mixed-case text format creates nice text capitalization.
These alternative forms are located in the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms unicode block.
A set of basic punctuation marks that align with the small capital letters had also been included and could be found in the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms & Private Use Area 2 unicode blocks.
I hope y'all like it
Cheers
PHOTONIA (Pro) - 70s future retro style
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70s style reverse contrast sans with future retro aesthetics, perfect for projects with a vintage sci-fi, space age or computer theme.
This is actually a refurbished and extended version of an older FontStruction I did back in 2019. The original PHOTONIA was a cool looking little work, but didn't quite made the most of its design concept. Inexperience and poor design decisions had led to inconsistencies and other flaws throughout the font. Besides those it also had a small character set that mostly consisted out of the basic Latin block and bare essential symbols & punctuation marks. But imo it still had quite an interresting retro vibe and the potential to be more. So I decided to give the old project some well deserved refreshments.
First I started eliminating the inconsistencies that were present in the older work, than I continued polishing and re-design / modify several characters hoping to create a greater overall unity to the entire piece. Once I was fully satisfied with this renewed improvements it was time to build and expand the character set towards a more complete lingual and typographic support.
➜ ⚠ Previous Version:
▶ Basic Latin only
▶ Minimal kerning
➜ ⚠ What's New Inside:
▶ Additional Latin and accented Latin
▶ Diacritics
▶ Many glyph alternative forms
▶ Additional symbols and punctuation marks
▶ Horizontal box drawing (page deviders)
▶ Typographical symbols
▶ Ornamental printer's characters
▶ 1680 stored kerning pairs
Cheers
This is a cloneBATAVIER (Pro) — Geometric display sans
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[ MEMOIR ]
Revision / revival of the geometric lettering seen on a 1916 Dutch litho poster for the Wm H. Müller & Co.'sRotterdam-London passenger service called Batavier-Line(Batavier-Lijn in Dutch) which was originally designed by Bart van der Leck(1876 - 1958).
The Batavier Line existed from 1830-1960, and was the oldest steam shipping line in The Netherlands.
[ UPDATE INTEL ]
A couple of small changes were implemented compared to v/d Leck's original lettering. Most significant is the upscaled Ampersand, but numerous other small cosmetic or optimizing modifications were made as well.
I completed the full alphabet plus numerals and included additional symbols and punctuation marks to make it a fully functional typeface. The lettering is all caps (majescule) only. Some lowercase letter locations harbour a glyph alternate uppercase form as could be seen in the original litho poster source. Another bunch of alternate uppercase forms and underlined “superior” small capital letters were located in the “Halfwidth And Fullwidth Forms” Unicode block. In addition to that it has accented Latin letters for multilingual support. Also two resized alternate forms for the Ampersand and two stylish ligatures have been included.
[ SUMMARY ]
This is actually the second revision I did for the litho lettering by v/d Leck. The first attempt was made using a (faux-) Bézier approach, resulting in a huge grid canvas (168 grid units / bricks tall monstrosity). This made it a lot of hard work to build and for some letters impossible to properly implement kerning since FS values only allows min. -10 / max. 10 of grid units for kerning.
As part of the endeavor to refurbish some of my older FontStructions STF BATAVIER was one of those that was in serious need of some overhauling as well. The problem it presented was the font's cap-height. It was actually so tall and impractical to work and / or modify, that the first revival attempt never really fully materialized beyond a basic character set.
A full glyph only fitted on screen with the FS-editor zoomed-out max. and my browser zoomed-out at 30%. At this scale not only the canvas grid lines in FS's editor all but dissapeared, but it also resulted in a down-sized brick (or 1 square grid unit) with on-screen rendering at only 3×3 pixels, as oposed to 64×64 pixels with the FS-editor's default zoom settings.
So imagine selecting a tiny 3×3 px speck when working the glyph canvas at brick level to modify glyphs... pretty much impossible. Now, the other situation wasn't a whole lot better. This had the browser's zoom restored back to 100%, making the glyph canvas at brick level “workable” again. But in respect to the cap-height this only renders a very small section of the glyph on-screen. Requiring a huge deal of additional canvas navigation in FS's canvas editor, better known as “Pan the view (H)”, which is done with the hand tool.
And well, as many of you will know, this is an absolute bummer When navigating (or panning) a glyph bottom to top requires 3 full canvas swipes.
So yeah, the only way for an extended version ever to materialize was to be rebuild it from the ground up at a much small scale, using very different measurement ratios compatible with FontStruct's kerning.
[ TECH INTEL ]
This second revision attempt successfully reduced the font's cap-height down to a comfortable 5 bricks (or grid units) tall and Em-square of 7 bricks total. Some optical compensations were implemented to certain elements such as stroke weight corrections and careful minute differences in vertical positioning of letter mid-section elements.
For now thats all Folks..
Cheers
JS-PTT 1975 (INLINE) ― Geometric modular typeface system
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Another font addition to the ever evolving and growing collection of revivals and inspired works called LETTERS OP MAAT, a project celebrating and trying to recreate the typographic contributions originally designed by Dutch graphic designer Jurriaan Schrofer. This time I did sort of a revision / recap based on Schrofer's 1975 trichromatic sketches he did for the PTT (TD) the technical department of the Dutch State Company of Post, Telegraphy and Telephony (PTT) that featured a style variation to one of his alphabet systems.
JS-PTT 1975 is a typeface family of three font styles called (SOLID), (INLINE)and (OUTLINE), that seemlessly overlap for combined multi-layer capabilities. Allowing easy multicolor replication similar to the original sketches and more, but also to provide three different isolated forms for individual use as separate fonts.
Now, without diving too deep into the man's biographic profile I do want to point out the following; ―Despite the unprecedented amount his typographic brilliance has contributed, he remains relatively unknown, but certainly no stranger among real typ-o-philes. Schrofer was light years ahead of its time. The level of crafmenship he put into his work was often overshadowed by his mind-blowing experimental, at times even bizarre and psychedelic typographic approach on letterforms, and can easily make one not truly realize the amount of expertise and skill often on display. Therefor he probably remains best known for his extravagant endeavours in book design.
Between 1973-1979 Schrofer worked on a assignement for the Dutch client called PTT (TD) this was during his time with Total Design. For the PTT (TD) Schrofer worked on a big multi project assignement he himself cataloged "Bewegwijzering Girokantoren". This essentially was the design of multiple visual identities for floorplans of 3 office buildings owned by the company. The project gave birth to several new style variation for several of his alphabet systems, one of those was this variation that introduced the rounded corners to some of the letterforms.
This particular recap was based on a alphabet system seen in numerous of sketches Schrofer designed in 1975 for the Dutch ministry of welfare, public health and culture (WVC) department for aesthetic design with the PTT. Part of the technical service at the PTT, responsible for the visual logistics of the company. The PTT, at the time a state-owned multi-utility company providing countless services. All the letters originally provided in Schrofer's sketches are included, I designed all the missing letters plus a couple of alernatives following the original's design parameters. In addition to that I designed and included numerals and some symbols and punctuation marks as well.
During my studies of Schrofer's work I noticed that various alphabet systems reappeared in many of his works. Further research showed that throughout his carreer he seemed to have developed and pre-fabricated multiple alphabet systems, variations and concepts that he constantly reused, refurbished, and recycled over the course of his carreer. Therefor it can be difficult to pin point the exact origins for some of his lettering concepts. Which is something I learned along the way and did not really anticipated for when I innitially started this LETTERS OP MAAT project, so some of my ealier fonts for this project haven't exactly all been properly researched.
For example the lettering concept seen in one of his designs for the PTT (TD) had already appeared two years prior of this PTT materials, when it was used in the 1973 brochure called Grafiek Per Postbode for Galerie 33. This brochure shows the same alphabet system that he later reuses for one of the PTT office builing floorplan designs. The brochure features an outlined variation of that same alphabet system for the text Heading, and a rounded mono-linear variation to this same alphabet system for the Subheading. This mono-linear variation itself had been used in the work for The Beurs van Berlage (Foundation) as well [IMAGE], the Beurs Van Berlage is a Dutch commodity market building located in the centre of Amsterdam. The alphabet system later then got digitalized for implimentation in the Dutch passport, and was acompanied by several additional derivative styles to this mono-linear version of (you can probably guess it) that same alphabet system, including a 5x7 Dot Matrix. Schrofer's design concept for the Dutch passport eventually never got used. And there were several other reapearances of the alphabet with several clients throughout his carreer.
I know it once again is a lot of info to digest, but I want to portray a proper image of the whole story that involves this project as well as it's font contribtions, so I can't help myself here, lol. But I'm pretty certain there are people out there that can appreciate this informative background, so I hope y'all didn't mind it too much.
The full font family could be found here: STF_PTT 1975
Interrested in more of my Jurriaan Schrofer inspired? Please take a look a my complete collection of Fontstructions tagged with STF-LETTERS OP MAATfor the full catalog of fonts I contributed to this project so far.
Cheers
BEACH RESORT — 1920s Art-Deco style
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Beach Resort is a tall geometric display sans inspired by the Art-Deco aesthetics.
It's condensed style makes up for a rather tall and narrow looking letter concept. The design is further characterized by this distinct asymmetric curve geometry. A tiny touch of stress was added on the vertical axis to create this gentle stroke contrast. The stressed weight of the horizontals automatically compensating it's optical correction issue.
— Only minimal kerning for now, more will be added soon
Hope y'all like it,
Cheers
TYPOGRAAF — Geometric modernist display typeface
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Typograaf is simple looking modernist style aimed for display use. It doesn't work well in a long line if text nor at smaller sizes. But perfect for large display work, logo's and such. The letterforms have several little nuances and multiple custom crafted curved parts with smooth (near) real Bézier contour quality.
So far only general concept plus some extra's was created, no multilingual suport for now.
Let me know what you think
Cheers