An italic version of the fontstruct logo and Structurosa by pauldhunt, using composte bricks and nudging.
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 UncialicPlease 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 cloneAll credit to Buro Destruct for their original bitmap design. Except for the &, that one’s mine.
I originally released this in 2008 as an exploration of the optical effect possible using different modules in a simple, gridded bitmap design. Buro Destruct iconic design was an inviting point of departure.
I have recreated/republished this at the request of four who took the inspiration and ran with it.
This is a clone of Med SplodeNarrow 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 cloneHere's what happens after I temporarily lose the ability to Fontstruct... ;) This started as an experiment to get around overshoots, but took of in a slightly different direction, with a touch of Uptake. Suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!
(2017: Isn't it wonderful when you don't touch a fontstruction for 3 years and still don't see anything to improve? I don't remember why I lost the ability to use FontStruct—probably because of either a power outage or being in a moving vehicle—but I would guess I sketched this out in my graph notebook before getting back on the site.)
I decided to be laynecom for a day, and this is the result. Didn't have time for numbers and punctuation though, unfortunately...
Some alternates available in Extended Latin A. Suggestions and critiques encouraged, as always. Thanks and enjoy!