PHOTONIA (Pro) - 70s future retro style
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70s style reverse contrast sans with future retro aesthetics, perfect for projects with a vintage sci-fi, space age or computer theme.
This is actually a refurbished and extended version of an older FontStruction I did back in 2019. The original PHOTONIA was a cool looking little work, but didn't quite made the most of its design concept. Inexperience and poor design decisions had led to inconsistencies and other flaws throughout the font. Besides those it also had a small character set that mostly consisted out of the basic Latin block and bare essential symbols & punctuation marks. But imo it still had quite an interresting retro vibe and the potential to be more. So I decided to give the old project some well deserved refreshments.
First I started eliminating the inconsistencies that were present in the older work, than I continued polishing and re-design / modify several characters hoping to create a greater overall unity to the entire piece. Once I was fully satisfied with this renewed improvements it was time to build and expand the character set towards a more complete lingual and typographic support.
➜ ⚠ Previous Version:
▶ Basic Latin only
▶ Minimal kerning
➜ ⚠ What's New Inside:
▶ Additional Latin and accented Latin
▶ Diacritics
▶ Many glyph alternative forms
▶ Additional symbols and punctuation marks
▶ Horizontal box drawing (page deviders)
▶ Typographical symbols
▶ Ornamental printer's characters
▶ 1680 stored kerning pairs
Cheers
This is a cloneBATAVIER (Pro) — Geometric display sans
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[ MEMOIR ]
Revision / revival of the geometric lettering seen on a 1916 Dutch litho poster for the Wm H. Müller & Co.'sRotterdam-London passenger service called Batavier-Line(Batavier-Lijn in Dutch) which was originally designed by Bart van der Leck(1876 - 1958).
The Batavier Line existed from 1830-1960, and was the oldest steam shipping line in The Netherlands.
[ UPDATE INTEL ]
A couple of small changes were implemented compared to v/d Leck's original lettering. Most significant is the upscaled Ampersand, but numerous other small cosmetic or optimizing modifications were made as well.
I completed the full alphabet plus numerals and included additional symbols and punctuation marks to make it a fully functional typeface. The lettering is all caps (majescule) only. Some lowercase letter locations harbour a glyph alternate uppercase form as could be seen in the original litho poster source. Another bunch of alternate uppercase forms and underlined “superior” small capital letters were located in the “Halfwidth And Fullwidth Forms” Unicode block. In addition to that it has accented Latin letters for multilingual support. Also two resized alternate forms for the Ampersand and two stylish ligatures have been included.
[ SUMMARY ]
This is actually the second revision I did for the litho lettering by v/d Leck. The first attempt was made using a (faux-) Bézier approach, resulting in a huge grid canvas (168 grid units / bricks tall monstrosity). This made it a lot of hard work to build and for some letters impossible to properly implement kerning since FS values only allows min. -10 / max. 10 of grid units for kerning.
As part of the endeavor to refurbish some of my older FontStructions STF BATAVIER was one of those that was in serious need of some overhauling as well. The problem it presented was the font's cap-height. It was actually so tall and impractical to work and / or modify, that the first revival attempt never really fully materialized beyond a basic character set.
A full glyph only fitted on screen with the FS-editor zoomed-out max. and my browser zoomed-out at 30%. At this scale not only the canvas grid lines in FS's editor all but dissapeared, but it also resulted in a down-sized brick (or 1 square grid unit) with on-screen rendering at only 3×3 pixels, as oposed to 64×64 pixels with the FS-editor's default zoom settings.
So imagine selecting a tiny 3×3 px speck when working the glyph canvas at brick level to modify glyphs... pretty much impossible. Now, the other situation wasn't a whole lot better. This had the browser's zoom restored back to 100%, making the glyph canvas at brick level “workable” again. But in respect to the cap-height this only renders a very small section of the glyph on-screen. Requiring a huge deal of additional canvas navigation in FS's canvas editor, better known as “Pan the view (H)”, which is done with the hand tool.
And well, as many of you will know, this is an absolute bummer When navigating (or panning) a glyph bottom to top requires 3 full canvas swipes.
So yeah, the only way for an extended version ever to materialize was to be rebuild it from the ground up at a much small scale, using very different measurement ratios compatible with FontStruct's kerning.
[ TECH INTEL ]
This second revision attempt successfully reduced the font's cap-height down to a comfortable 5 bricks (or grid units) tall and Em-square of 7 bricks total. Some optical compensations were implemented to certain elements such as stroke weight corrections and careful minute differences in vertical positioning of letter mid-section elements.
For now thats all Folks..
Cheers
For Sándor. The font has upper and lower case. Having 'played' with the baselines for the letters I decided that this font looked better with LC letters aligned at the top rather than on the base line. The font has basic Latin and most glyphs of the more Latin set, and I added the Polish diacritics.
BEACH RESORT — 1920s Art-Deco style
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Beach Resort is a tall geometric display sans inspired by the Art-Deco aesthetics.
It's condensed style makes up for a rather tall and narrow looking letter concept. The design is further characterized by this distinct asymmetric curve geometry. A tiny touch of stress was added on the vertical axis to create this gentle stroke contrast. The stressed weight of the horizontals automatically compensating it's optical correction issue.
— Only minimal kerning for now, more will be added soon
Hope y'all like it,
Cheers
SPOKOYNOY NOCHI — 1920's Art-Deco style
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This is a simple monolinear Art-Deco unicase font. Upper & Lower case glyphs are the same sets. But in addition to the unicase (default style) there is a full alphabet of glyph alternate forms located in the Half Width And Full Width Forms Unicode block.
I done global kerning, but extra pairs are still required..
I hope you like it,
Cheers
GROOVERIDER — 70's future retro display sans
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Grooverider is another groovy looking display style with that distinctive 70's retro aesthetics.
The concept for the lettering is that of a solid future retro / space-age style with inversed-stress. It's reversed weight contrast adds some additional groovin' funkyness and good old boogie wonder flavour to the font's overall characteristics. Making it somewhat of a hybrid mixture between two distinct 70's and 80's retro styles.
Simple at the surface, but rather complex down at the Editor level, since the letterforms have several tailor-made geometry and curve shapes. Pulling off some glyphs without disrupting the (near) real Bézier curve geometry was tricky I must say. Like for example the joined letters such as lowercase Æ/Œ, question mark, @ sign, number 2 digit, percent sign and lowecase letter S all proved difficult. But also some unlikely ones that are typically pretty straight forward now were trickier within the font's parameters. But I'm pretty satisfied with the end result so far. Little to no compromising imperfections slipped into the design, one or two real minor ones are present, but only truly become noticeable once the size is fully blown up.
It was very fun to make though, I hope y'all like it...
Cheers
This is a cloneMy little personal and humble tribute to our Astonishing FontStruct on its 16th birthday, full of admiration and respect for the Great Creator & Big Chief Rob Meek and all fontstructors, big and small, who used it during these amazing years! LONG LIVE FONTSTRUCT!!!