Wednesday 14 July 2010

Doing 'The Wrong Thing' (TM) Again…

So, I still have a bunch of exams at school I need pass through and instead of studying I'm playing around. This time I designed quite a strange and very early work in progress sans serif font. It has only letters of latin alphabet and three Czech diacritic marks. And of course, it's not a font but just a SVG file with font design idea :-D

The original idea was to design a font that would look good in computer interfaces, hence I targeted a rather small size for starters. But as I played with the shapes it evolved into something, for good or bad, more complex. The strokes are not constant width which is quite unusual for sans-serif font… And of course, I wanted the font to look good to me, which explains lots of the oddities of it ^_^. During the designing I noticed that it's much easier to start from simple shapes (like even succession of lines) that approximate the shape at target resolution and then slowly improve the detail so that the glyph looks good when zoomed in as well. Here's a preview:



In case someone would like to play with it I've put the source SVG on my fedorapeople page, you can consider the licence to be CC-BY-SA or even Public Domain for the time being (it's just a sketch, no real font) so do pretty much anything you want with it, but it would be nice if you showed me results of such playing, if any ;-)

And one thing to add: font design is quite tedious, especially if you are a complete newbie, just these few glyphs took me a few days of work :-D

1 comment:

nicu said...

Creating a font is something i am not bold enough to try, I expect it to be hard and long work, but I know you are not afraid of hard and long work :D