very good work. cool idea :)

you built that with stretched bricks??? phew... must have been fun...:D but respect for the idea, i'd never have come up with that!
and yeah, the new blocks would definitely have saved a lot of time and prevented a lot of brain damage from sitting in front of the computer for nights racking our brains out to find a way of making good-looking characters with only 45 degree angles, right? shame i only discovered them today, AFTER creating the main character set for 3 fonts during the last few days... guess they would have looked quite a bit different if i had scrolled down a bit more before...
anyway, cool font, great concept, awesome dingbats again!
(sorry if this wasn't a lot about your font, i guess i need a forum around here for general chit-chat, haha)

Em42: This is the best fontstruction ever. I really mean that. Hail to the Queen!

And a tip of the hat for inviting a healthy discussion. Allow me to indulge.

Really interesting I find that point of conceptual strictness, or purity you raise about the new bricks...& all their accompanying permutations. Part of me also really appreciates a limited brick set – and the creativity it inspires – but I must say there has never been a consistently followed rule about which bricks exist in the brick palette.

We have our basic shapes (square; circle; 45° angles; full-brick quarter round; quarter-brick square; etc.), and then we have a certain set of permutations generated by combining two or more bricks with Boolean logic – i.e. the magic behind Illustrator’s pathfinder palette. We have some (but not all) basic inverses (Boolean NOT), e.g. the boomerang bricks are inverses of the quarter round bricks. We have some (but not all) basic additions (OR), e.g. all the quarter-brick permutations could be made from stacking the first four one-quarter squares in various ways. We have some (but not all) basic intersections (AND), e.g. the bow tie bricks – or more basically the half-bow tie bricks – are the intersection of two 45° bricks. And we have some tricky bricks that would take a whole chain of booleans to create starting with the most basic ones!

I have been able to discern no rule to rigorously explain FontStruct's palette. And I don't need to, A: because FontStruct is already so f’n rad, and B: because the creators here seem to have struct – sorry, I mean struck – a pretty fine balance of bricks most essentially useful when constructing modular fonts.

Which brings me back to your interesting point about purity of method. I will take it a step further by offering this mind experiment (which in practice may be near impossible to implement at this point). If Rob gave us just one boolean operation to work with (the glorious OR) – which in effect allows us to “stack” multiple bricks on the same cell – we would be able to do two amazing things. First, we would have access to an almost exponentially larger set of bricks (creative constraints can also come from within...just as can creative excesses!). Second, we would be able to construct a great deal of the current brick set (new or otherwise) from an impressively basic master set. Single-click access be damned! We could get all purist and toss out a whopping 67 bricks without at all narrowing the geometric possibilities! Talk about eliminating the insignificant!

So, brick stacking: Just a glitch fiend’s pipe dream? Or the last major system revision before Rob Meek goes ahead and unleashes user-definable bricks?


On that note, I now feel an irresistible urge go create a fontstruction named glitch fiend pipe dream. That is all.

Thanks for the open discussion Em.
I love the monkey font, but I'd like to commend you on the crisp illustrations of the bee symbols in this one.

In regards to working with stretched bricks, there is nothing to fear! I don't see them as a mess, or brain damaging, or hard to handle. In fact, some of the designs I'm working on now that really push the limits of "modularity" utilize the stretched bricks. Usually they're only hard to handle if you're converting an existing 1:1 design ratio and scaling up - then it can quickly become crowded with unwanted protruding artifacts. But if you approach a new blank FontStruction and scale up beforehand, it becomes so much easier. If you double the width or height individually, you are essentially doubling the grid real estate that you can work on through overlaying bricks. If you double both the width and height, you exponentially increase the grid real estate, opening up the potential for really complex designs. The HulkSmash font I just released (its getting to be a habit to release when movies come out) works with double height and width bricks with massive overlays using almost every new triangular brick.

In regards to new bricks, I hope you've already changed your mind about "brick rules." I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't seem to be playing by any rules, so the comment seemed kind of odd to me. I see every new brick as a welcomed addition, but realize how too many bricks can be a potential problem. I have a lot of happy accidents just experimenting. The design for Brikd happened only out of experiments done when the rectangular and quarter square bricks were released. Experiments with the new triangular bricks led to HulkSmash. And the fun was in achieving these special designs with standard bricks and a plethora of tricks!

As far as I can remember, the original Technic sets were the first to break the basic Lego brick, so to say, mould. Introducing holes in the sides of the bricks necessitated creation of a whole slew of additional non-brick components to the standard Lego bricks. Technic increased the possibilities in design but limited the creativity of the designers. Something akin to standing in the cereal aisle with an overwhelming number of options to choose from if a pre-existing favorite does not exist. Too many bricks spoil the fontstruct?

Mister master williaum's use of ANDing bricks gives us 159!=2.9467022724950383265043395073512e+282 possible brick combination. (I don't even know how large that number is). A virtual Bionicle of fontstruct bricks. If Rob adds OR or NOT functionality (or if someone discovers another fortunate OR/NOT bug) to fontstruct, the modularity of all of this will be as good as no modularity.

Choices paralyze. Creativity lies in coming up with new solutions working within the limitations. This is why when I set out to create a font, I devise a certain set of rules for the font and stay within its parameters whether it generates good glyphs or not. The question I ask myself is: Is infinite freedom freedom?

Maybe the problem is not too many choices, rather the deer designer (points to self) caught in the bricklights. At this point, I am not even sure if I am for or against additional bricks in the basic set. Sorry for rambling.

PS: Love the seasonal dingbats! :)