EPOCH - Modern light-weight geometric display sans
───── 「 MEASURES 」
(in grid units)
X-Height: 1
Cap-Height: 2
Descent: 1
Optical Corrections: None
Stroke: 1/8 th
4-Em / 0.125 : 1-Stroke (0.125 ≍ 1/8 th)
― No filters used.
───── 「 SUMMARY 」
This is yet another deep dive into the very small and tiny quantum realm of FontStruct's small grid and light-weight stokes.
Unlike some of my previous endeavours into this dark corner of the FS-editor, which could have dizzying complexity in forms, this project for once didn't stress the sh....*t out of me by stretching the limits for my capabilities beyond what is still comfortable this time. Nor did it drain every last frigging bit of my knowledge or clever creative insight to pull it off.
On the contrary,
For once it remained largely a pretty straight forward and easy project in terms of forms and geometry. The absence for most of the 'bar-raising' features such as diagonal forms, rounded, transitions or stroke modulation made this 'FontStruction' that much more easy.
And when metaphorically breaking it down to the bare naked form and necessities, this design mainly consist of FS's (default)-brick set, resized modifications of those, combined with a set of stacked composites.
There a still a number of things I'd rather seen differently, and will see later attempts at making improvement, but taken in a broad perspective most of the included material so far look pretty fine to me already. And to point out one of the things that is still bugging actually are the 'accented' letters.
Some glyphs have odd values for their 'character'-width, and this makes it impossible to achieve 'grid to em-square'-bounding box allignement in FS's editor. So accents in these asymmetrical values look slightly ofset.
― "Changing character widths to nearest even value is simply far too destructive to the stylish characteristics of the fonts appearance"
───── 「 ABOUT THE FONT 」
In the end it became a pretty cool looking light-weight geometric modernist sans-serif style that at the same time has strong hints of Art-Deco-style lettering as well.
And apart from the minor things it fell short with, I think there is a lot about its overall character-set design and forms that is looking pretty darn rad actually if you ask me.
Content-wise the font is a single case design in a 'all-caps' or Majuscule style. The (Lc)-string was kept empty for deliberately for the technical reason of preserving all the (default)-blank metrics data for any further design updates.
───── 「 WHATS INSIDE 」
A little bit of everything...
■ Body text formatting:
□ Basic-Latin based character set with accented letters & numerals
□ Most punctuation marks
□ Numerous symbols
■ Decorative formatting
□ Pictorial attributes
□ Repeating patterns
───── 「 THE END 」
Let me know what you think so far,
Cheers
MOVIEMAX — Groovy bold & roundish 70s display sans
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Moviemax is a bold display sans-serif that has a groovy 70s offbeat look. Essentially an all-caps lettering concept with simple looking letters. The basic geometry and inversed contrast with its soft rounded finish create an immediate endearing effect.
The default characterset comes as all-caps (unicase) only, with no glyph alternative forms. It has been completed with additional symbols and punctuation marks.
To make thing a little more interresting I have also included a full (A-Z) alphabet set of small-caps letter modifications with drastically altered proportions. Complete removal of the inversed stressed contrast to make a more simplified and cleaner looking minimalist letter style. Their size was also reduced to 50% of the cap-height (scale ratio ≈ 1:2), providing an optional alternative for the missing lowercase forms in the font.
To finished off this extra set of small capital letters, another additional full (A-Z) alphabet set of large capital letters was included. These letters have also been scaled down a bit to better fit with the small capital letter set (scale ratio ≈ 6:8 or 75% of cap-height).
The 2 sets include a slight more unique and stylized level of sophisticated characteristics to the font, and when used combined together in a mixed-case text format creates nice text capitalization.
These alternative forms are located in the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms unicode block.
A set of basic punctuation marks that align with the small capital letters had also been included and could be found in the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms & Private Use Area 2 unicode blocks.
I hope y'all like it
Cheers
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
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 cloneVAN NELLE (Blueprint) — Geometric modernist sans
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☛ THE SOURCE
A re-interpretation of the 1926 geometric sans serif alphabet system reproduction by Jacob Jongert, published in a 1930 sourcebook by N.J. van de Vecht. The geometric uppercase set of the alphabet system is what would later become the famous sans serif capitals which he used for lettering throughout many of his Van Nelle materials.
☛ THE FONTSTRUCTION
Attempt at making a convincing recap of the original alphabet by Jacob Jongert as it was shown in the 1930s sourcebook, and extrapolate that into a full functional font. The decision to go with a small grid sparked a number of limitations in terms of the design freedom that forced some inevitable changes. But the general idea sort of became not to make it a revival, but rather more or less a faithful revision. One that would still be instantly recognizable yet didn't necessarily had to be all about accuracy.
☛ —The small grid design made sure this wasn't happening anyway!
But, for instance, the most striking difference between the two fonts (their weight) in fact is such a byproduct for one of those limitations. Something FS's small grid couldn't properly reproduce, so VAN NELLE (Blueprint) has a slight stronger weight, making the font somewhat of a bold style version of the original. This in addition provided me with slight extra freedom to inplement a little personal touch for further manicure of the font's finer details. Which allowed me to cope with some of the optical clunkiness that come with a fatter face and the grid based design.
Besides these circumstantial differences, which were basically beyond my control, I've also made some intentional changes to make the typeface more practical to use. The changes include things like the significantly lowered ascender height, the slight different width for certain letters, larger tittle (dot above i, j & ij), and several more. despite these changes I believe it very much still reflects what Jongerts once invisioned for the system.
☛ SOME NOTES ON THE ORIGINAL AND ITS CREATOR
Jacob Jongert(1883-1942) was a advertising designer from the Netherlands. After varied studies, including being Roland Holst’s assistant and an acquaintance and colleague of S. H. de Roos [who brought the Arts & Crafts ideas of William Morris to the Netherlands and devoted his career to book design and typography] with whom Jongert experimented with several printing techniques and discovered graphic design as his ideal art form.
¶ In 1923 Jongert rolled in a unique and long-term collaboration with the Van Nelle company, where he became head designer, a position he held until 1940. The Van Nelle company had an extremely modern approach towards advertising (they even commissioned Cassandre to do a poster) and Jongert created for the firm a recognizable image with clear shapes, powerful letters and primary colours, totally Dutch avant-garde in style, and with a strict and rigorous approach directly linked to De Stijl principles. The corporate identity he created has become a milestone in the design world.
¶ The lettering, however, is the driving force that ties it all together. The style is a straightforward set of plain, mono-linear, sans serif capitals in a style that just started to come into fashion in the late 1920s, early 1930s with the rise of functionalism and geometric type design. Yet, while these ideas were already thrown out there, its clever simplicity plus the systematic and cohesive way Jongert implemented his lettering was unusual at the time. The square and minimal construction of the forms allowed the letters to contract and expand to fit any situation, yet maintain a consistent and recognizable appearance throughout the Van Nelle line. ¶ Something we only recently have learned to appreciate is to see his hand crafted system amid the current advancements in variable-font technology, which offers a similar kind of flexibility to typeface designs. A quality that certainly placed him well ahead of its time.
What I particulary like about Jongert's original is the stuff that is going on in the lowercase set of the alphabet, which are those quirky lowercase letter inventions that are different from the more traditional modernist sans, but sadly the lowercase letters were pretty much never used in his works.
I created a simple PDF typeface specimen for those who want to see the high-resolution preview.
PDF SPECIMEN WAS DELETED
Thats all Folks ☚
☛ Cheers
ALIEN WORMHOLE (BOLD) - Monolinear Sci-Fi-inspired 'worm' typeface.
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This is a 'Bold' style version to the "ALIEN WORMHOLE" type family.
This version has a ton of extra character compared to the 'Light' version.
For now only the two 'Basic Latin' sets, some symbols and a small number of puctuation marks match. And it remains to be seen if I can translate back to the Light version all those extra's that were put into this Bold version.
I mentioned 'type family' earlier, but in reality there isn't a whole lot of family just yet. Since the two for now hardly correlate truly.
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Here is a link to the 'Light' version
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Stay tuned for future updates.
Cheers
Fauxhaus — Geometric minimalist modernism sans-serif design
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[INSPIRATION]
As the name already suggests, this indeed was inspired by the Bauhaus-typograpy towards functionality style.
More specifically by Austrian artistic polymath Herbert Bayer's 1925 experimental "Universal" alphabet.
The alphabet he designed became somewhat synonymous with the school's identity, and probably is the most well known Bauhaus typeface, and truly epitomizing that typical simplified "Form follows function" Bauhaus-minimalism style. It was also used for the new Bauhaus-building signage.
Some key features in Bayer's original form are those easily recognizable geometric sans-serif letterings, with letter composition based on strong basic geometry, having eliminated all decorative elements of the letterform composition for that crisp industrial, slight mechanical minimalist aesthetic. Bayer's original Universal alphabet also eliminated the need for a upper case letter, further simplifying it towards more of a functionality-driven standardization. Bayer developed multiple revisions and variations of the alphabet. Sadly Universal was never cast as a font, as during that era they weren't manufactured into printing typefaces, and the designs would only exist as drafts (as was the case with all Bauhaus-typefaces). Nonetheless it served as a lettering model for Bauhaus students, colleagues, and followers alike, and they were regularly re-used for signs, book covers and publications by many of its members, but even beyond institution walls the typographic style began to gain a foothold. Throughout the years we have seen a multitude of revivals and other Bauhaus-inspired typeface designs. Some of which that try to be faithful digitizations of the original, whereas others taking a more artistic approach to the style by providing their own personalized reinterpretation of the Bauhaus-aesthetic. So even to this day, many decades later, it repeatedly continues to inspire and influence designers time and again.
Bayer, First a student and later junior master of the printing workshop, was one of Bauhaus’s most influential attendees, advocating the integration of all arts throughout his career. Though not trained as a typographer, he was also assigned with the task of creating a universal visual & typographic identity for the school.—a task Bayer took very serious.Sparking perhaps the most mythic typeface to ever come out of the Bauhaus, which is "Universal"—one that at that time strove to be as idealistic as the school itself
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[THE "FAUXHAUS" FONT]
This is an artistic reinterpretation of Bayer's "Universal" alphabet.
Aiming to preserve the unmistakable style and simplistic geometric stylistic properties of the original, while in the same time allowing a more 'free-form'-approach towards crafting the letterform compositions. This of-course as long as they remains in-line with the stylistic properties of the original. And for the lack of having a better explanation;
—To do sort-of a 'faithfully different' artist depiction of Bayer's original Universal alphabet.
Some notable differences made in Fauxhaus compared to Universal are the re-introduction of a upper case form and the slight de-simplification and inclusion of subtle decorative nuance.
In some cases I've choosen to compose certain specific characters to be more or less identical as to how Bayer originally intended them, whereas others may be entirely different looking. And for some characters have one or more alternative form as well. Some of which are more 'ad hoc'- compositions drawn as we went when new ideas popped up. But others were specifically created to preserve and / -or include certain distinctive and unmistakably identifiable letterforms from Bayer's original Universal alphabet.
Greek & Cyrillic characters included in Fauxhaus were solely added for my personal experimentation purpose only, and they serve 'zero' function as to additional language support of the font.
"Use at your very own risk"— as these could very easily be gone the very next update.
Each letterform was meticulously composed from a random collection of the various memories, which after some thirty Bauhaus-inspired and / -or -revival works including their respective 'shared' research I have accumulated over time for Bauhaus typography like Bayer's work.
No source reference image was used as guidance for creating this FontStruction, everything came straight from the knowledge I gathered from the many previous Bauhaus related projects I did.
So to draw solely from memory alone somewhat a convincing and reasonably similar personal reinterpretation of an original 'Bauhaus' typeface at this stage has gotten pretty easy for me.
For this project in particular I've choosen to construct the letterforms on a medium sized grid, using the linear interpolation 'faux'-Bézier method. So beware that when using this font at very large point size rendering the remnants of this process will become visible!
That's all for now, I hope you like it so far,
Cheers
This is a cloneLORD KRUMBLE —A transitional sans that mixed Art-Deco with neo-classical humanist minuscules
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Inspired to celebrate the homecoming of him who strikes fear in all badly baked treats, the one which nightmares are made of, that kind of person that makes every cookie crumble and wanna skip school for a day or two. Of course I'm talking about the one and only "Cookielord".
— "What could'nt be better suiting than to have a freshly crasfted and new font that is celebrating his return."
Him recently dropping a new FontStruction somewhat came as a pretty unexpected but nice surprise. It just so happened to be that I was already looking for new ideas that could lead to the next project. In fact, until recently I was actually still struggling with this, and hadn't really been able to provide a catchy and motivating design theme to bring to the table that would once again help me on my way with starting a new FontStruct project. So I took this occasion to see if I was able to find a little inspiration in his Verminfont. Not particularly aimed at doing a derivative work, nor anything closely resembling his cool font. Instead rather trying to draw some inspiration from that peculiar and playful but friendly characteristic, that to me personally distinguishes his Vermin font the most anyway.
╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍
And so I appoligize for the fact that this doens't truly relates or do justice stylistically in any way to the aesthetic present in Cookielord's original Vermin font. That being said, this is what became the end product of that.
But, it does have one striking resemblance that pays a homage to him, and that is the included cookie. Sorry I took a bite out of it my friend, hope you can still appreciate it.
— Just to let you know that regardless wether you decide to stay or not, your recent return isn't going to be for nothing!!
╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍╍
No 'Brick Size' filters were used, which of course presented me with a lot of challenges that limited the amount of complexity I was able to put in, something that wouldn't been the case with (2:2) 'Brick Size' filter settings. The other noteworthy aspect to this particular fontstruct is its grid size, which is tiny. Never before have I made a Fontstruction that required kerning values to fluctuate only as little as 0,01. This also made it impossible to implement optical corrections on the vertical axis in the form of overshoots, but luckily this didn't became a very clear issue in the end.
I'm not sure if I can complete the additional Latin accents for all characters due to the limited grid space available surrounding some of glyphs. I might try doing those later.
Let me know what u think of it so far fella's, stay tuned!
Cheers
SEADWELLERS — 1920s Art-Deco Sans style
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I was somewhat inspired to do a Art-Deco style lettering of my own after seeing the stylish Art-Deco flavored FontStruction Aquamarine by IronClaws
Other than that the two fonts remain unrelated and Seadwellers poses no resemblance to Aquamarine. Instead I sort of did a 1920s Art-Deco style lettering with thin geometric letterforms. It's comes as a Majuscule only and the letters have nice quirky width variations, with some letters appearing almost extended, while others are more narrow.
— The similar aqua-themed concept is merely coincidental.
Only basic character set!
It remains a WIP for now..
Cheers