Suggestions welcome! 

See more:

https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/1323866/elion-c

https://www.behance.net/gallery/13692951/Stina

Apparently, it is quite easy to forget what gets a fontstruction going. Something about ultra condensed bla bla bla. The rest is just a matter of having a creative activity to occupy the mind. And if in the process you can help out a friend, all the better.

Again, I'm publishing this although it is not finished yet. Seems to become a habit ;-) Anyway, the name of this font is the German word for temporal paradox and this should illustrate the fact that I started this typeface as a Times alternative. As you can see, however, it took a very different direction.

I will add more glyphs in the course of time.

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...

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 clone

Narrow 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 clone

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 clone