The ultra-low resolution of this grid may be difficult to grasp without cloning. Fontstruct’s logo has a nominal x-height of 3 bricks, by comparison.
The level of detail, control, and finesse possible in a given fonstruction depended mostly on resolution prior to the recent advent of stackable composites. Did you want it better? Make it bigger!
Brute force, now meet Elegance.
Instead of building individual glyphs hundreds of bricks tall, stackable composites allow us to design rich modular schemata hundreds of bricks deep. Using curved bricks at their largest scale, linear and curvilinear elements dynamically harmonize and oppose. As well, screen fonts can be effectively hinted (aside from notable lack of kerning controls) without sacrificing the integrity of joins and intersections. And the trapping possibilities, Oh the sweet sweet trapping possibilities...
Please, vote kindly and stay tuned for more :)
This is a clonePlease enjoy a private clone to see how I dealt with contrast, curves, bracketing, variable letter width and the difficult-to-achieve emboldening of the capitals’ vertical strokes within a minimal fontstruct matrix (and If you like what you see, please download for personal usage and vote kindly! :)
Intaglio’s amazing recent work makes similar strides (see the excellent rounds, for example), offering a solution before me to several of these long-standing impasses of the medium.
More characters to come... :)
This is a cloneP.S. There’s a starting character on Í (option+shift+s for Mac). Spaces can be used to pad the wave effect and create shapes and background textures. Enjoy!
This is a clone of xe O Marks the FontAnother leap toward the elusive subtractive Boolean.
Each character consists of nine bricks arranged in a 3 x 3, filtered and scaled, composite-stack matrix. Insane levels of smooth detail result.
This filtered, subtractive stacking technique extends those first published here.
Enjoy a private clone to grok my unknown approach. The possibilities are endless...
A winning, small-matrix rendition of this super-elliptical monoline sans. If you’d like, please enjoy a private clone to tour the brand-spankin’ new interiors.
I embraced innovation at the expense of imperfection with faux-curve composite stacks. These custom bricks are used to resolve the most glaring proportion issues besetting version 1 (and 2’s) capitals. I risk intermittent aliasing as well as potential inconsistencies in both curvature and stroke contrast. Yet these composite-stack discontinuities (A,C,D,G,J,O,Q,S,U,V) marry unexpectedly well with the extensively used macaroni bricks and remain themselves smooth up to an impressive 72pt.
Manual kerning leaves a lot of room for improvement. The alternates are included mostly for curiosity’s sake. Another work in progress with samples to follow. Feedback is always very appreciated; thanks in advance for it! :)
This is a cloneNarrow and heavy, ultra bold Piano key designs once required fractional brick scaling to generate their distinctive slit-like counter forms while working with maximum curves. Composite stacks provide a more elegant and versatile solution to this old problem. In this way, they can be seen as an important milestone on the road toward individually scalable bricks...
Letterspacing is kept tight in this fontstruction, but still needs a great deal of manual kerning especially around all the character lacking serifs on one or both sides.
72+ initial downloads done during testing and troubleshooting. More characters to come. Enjoy, and please vote kindly. : )
This is a clone149 custom bricks for your perusal! Only custom bricks are in the palette, so you can clone this and easily start drawing right away.
I'll definitely be adding more with time. I love this sort of experimentation!
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Starfield & Stripes Copyright 2014 - 2020 Doug Peters. Stars & Stripes composite version. Composite placeholder of a layered font family, where the star background field is on one layer, the stars are on another layer, stripes on another, a background on yet another, and maybe eventually an outline font. There are other possibilities, as well. Each glyph is (of course) the same width as the corresponding glyph in any of the other layers, so that when you duplicate the final edit for a text layer, you simply change the new duplicated layer's font to the chosen layer and then select all and chose your color. This way you can have white stars on navy starfield with red stripes over a white background and a golden outline. The outline font can be placed underneath for a thin shadow outline, or over all the fonts for a thick, bold outline. And of course, you can choose your own color for each font and only use the layered fonts you want to.
This font reflects the design of the characters with the starfield design & stripes design font layers, and can act as a placeholder for the layered fonts (and has also been nudged over to clear a spot for the outline layer). Glyphs are the same width and use the exact same kerning.