Ray Meadow’s gorgeous take on uncial script is one of the best large-scale fontstructions ever released. The font has character, wit, and charm to spare and surely deserves all the attention and adulation awarded it by fontstructors and paying customers alike. Like any great work, it compels us to look closely and savour the details.
Inspecting Ray’s work, I sensed a range of mostly minor refinements and exacting adjustments that might make this gem shine all the more brightly. So, in the spirit of camaraderie, I requested permission to apply myself to a clone of his work in order to bring forth and share some of these suggestions. Approached in stages, the task of polishing this stone to my liking spread out over more than half a year.
My main goal was to smooth the modular geometry out as much as possible, address some stroke weight and contrast issues throughout, and rebalance specific forms. In many cases, I use custom composite and advanced stacking tricks to fine tune the curves of these letterforms. Upon studious inspection, a wealth of tweaks are revealed. I suspect that setting basic words and sentences is now an even greater joy with this version, and pray it will be of benefit and inspiration to make Ray’s great work even better.
The total effect strikes a greater unity between the uppercase and the lowercase. A few letters are significant departures from their starting points (K, k R, W) and offered both as suggestions for the mains and ideas for alternates. After so many hours of exploratory modulation, I am pleased to share this technical feedback with Ray and the fontstruct community*.
*For now cloning is off until I can communicate with Ray about the best approach to take with this. Hopefully we can find a way to share this without attracting a torrent of rip-offs.
This is a clone of RMWL Uncialic>> thalamic’s description (with edit)
Permutation: The act of changing the arrangement of a given number of elements.
One font, two different brick combinations.
Picking any two bricks from the 169 available gives a total possible combinations of 14196 (169C2) different fonts. Counting a certain kinds of bricks as one--all four 45degree, for instance--gives 36 unique bricks, resulting in 630 (36C2) unique combinations or fonts.
In this font, if the bricks are swapped with each other, the result will be a different font. Hence order of the bricks matter. In which case, nCr (combinations) is not the right choice. What's needed is nPr (permutations). 169P2 gives 28392 permutations and a 36P2 gives 1260 permutations.
So, at a minimum, 1260 fonts are possible with the current implementation of FontStruct, with just this particular layout of bricks.
This whole permuatation thing is so fun and easy to play around with. The original fs Permutation series worked with just the bricks that were available by default. Since then, the FontStructor has evolved, allowing for, in part, custom bricks. This new permutation was not possible before. This one is created just to show that custom bricks can be dragged and dropped on top of the existing ones replacing the standard bricks. The bricks used here are [edit: custom composites] .
Clone it and play around.
Instructions
1. Select a brick from the standard bricks or create your own custom brick.
2. Click and drag it to the brick in the first position in My Bricks until that brick turns gray.
3. Release.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 for the brick in the second position in My Bricks.
Learn. Enjoy. Share your permutation.