What began nearly 8 years ago as an experiment in multi-stage, multi-resolution pixel serif type drafting (starting smallish then manually upscaling x4), took on the robust character you see here after countless edits and some tricky lessons learned along the way.
The initial weight was on the light side (cloned privately for posterity), so I took a leap into this bookish weight by fattening each glyph copy-pasted 1 pixel shifted both up and to the right. A rudimentary technique, by no means novel, yet almost wholly effective. I saw fit from here to only make a handful of corrections, keeping the slightly rounded and slanted serif shape that resulted as well as the subtle reenforcing of a pen-nib construction.
More intriguing is the 1-bit “anti-aliasing” scheme I found myself progressively guided toward while finding the lines of these curves developing the initial light weight. Implied diagonals and said curves – as well as refinement of contrast – are substantially more granular and specific than had I taken a black-and-white posterized, or stairstepped approach.
At half-resolution, the resulting smoothness is acceptible. This type of hinting will be useful in developing a substitution rule set consisting of subpixel slanted or curved bricks to produce a “vectorized” version.
Indeed, such a process could be purely automated by a proficient developer or properly trained neural network (this would be a really interesting future feature for fontstruct pro – rather than hinting a font after painstaking vector construction, why not reverse the process by way of en vogue ai-assisted upscaling?).
Basic accented charaters and numerals are being added as I churn through the extended character set...
While recreating/revising one of my very first fontstructions – April 2008’s Asgard (second to last one) – I realized it was going to take something more drastic still than switching to 2x2 filter settings to realize my dream of a harmonized U&lc set.
The original’s lowercase had several compelling and unique features (at the time), the uppercase worked well enough in all caps display settings...but they very rarely sat comfortably together. The answer couldn’t have been more simple: since the caps (which surprisingly came first...or does this just reveal my noobishness at the time?) are rather narrow, the lowercase itself needed to follow a more logically elongated model.
Here the flexibility of 2x2 filters kicks into high gear as the original design’s lc is tweaked by half a brick extra height to bring about a more righteously rockin’ family.
(Asgard 1.x plateaued at 829 characters, so – as always – more to come...)