thalamic: FontStructions

fs chunk-chip

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I've been seeing a lot of almost-completely-filled-blocks-with-chips-in-them kind of fonts lately. Quite well promoted too. I find most of them to be illegible. No matter what someone says about style and movement and period, to me, type exist to communicate, and legibility is the keystone of that functionality. If I can't decipher the glyph as a letter in a fraction of a second, the typeface has failed, no matter how beautiful it might be to look at as a graphic element. This is what I have tried to do here: taken a current trend and tried to make a legible typeface, staying within the parameters of said style. Most glyphs are quite legible but some are not, like s v w 0 8 9 & etc. I have failed as well.
Plus I am not happy with the consistency—or lack thereof—either. It bothers me that the inside chips had to be rotated from character to character or move them about here and there. I did the uppercase as well...then deleted them all because I just couldn't resolve the similarity between H and N. I may have to find a less ______* new hobby.

* stationary? senatory? Sitting around idle. What's the word am I looking for, intaglio?

fs Dent

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

fs tributary

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

This was an exercise in trying to extract as standard a serif typeface as possible out of the FontStructor. The 't' is the token quirk. Oh and there's an introbang in here too. :)

fs Fontsration (Refined)

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

This started out as a 'why not'. When it showed potential, I added more glyphs to round out the character set.

— Alt. t at { for words beginning with it.
— ll (double l) lig. at } for a nicer fit.

fs AUGHT Three

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Yet another version that came while modifying AUGHT One to AUGHT To. And believe it or not, in the process of doing these three fonts, enough additional glyphs were created and deleted to fill at least two more variants. This is why the Clone is enabled again so someone else might experiment some more, if they so choose.

fs AUGHT One

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Although build from scratch, AUGHT should really appear as a clone of ought because the idea is the same, just a different execution. Some glyphs came together fairly easy (A B C etc.), others took some doing (T Y S), some just don't work out well (G P Q Z), and some worked too well (I J).

fs AUGHT To

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

While trying out different Z possibilities for AUGHT One, struck on the Z shown here, which made it necessary to bring other letters to conformity. This fontstruction works better, methinks.

fs Inflate [03] Pop

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

See Inflate Poof

fs Inflate [01] Pfft

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

See Inflate Poof

fs Inflate [02] Puff

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

See Inflate Poof

fs Inflate [04] Poof

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Some fontstructions just come together quickly. The idea was to find a way to achieve pixel-level color manipulation without manually coloring each pixel. Hope you find it entertaining if not useful.

--View anTyp's Peteroque for a far superior example of layering and coloring pixels technique.

fs _istic

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Although I had no intention of further development on the FS_Minimal front, but the design of the lowercase s of Minimal compelled me to do this one. It appears as a clone because I wanted to maintain a link to the original, but all the characters have been build anew. All except the lowercase s from Minimal which became the uppercase S for _istic.

fs Very Becoming

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

fs Blueprint

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Alternate character glyphs:

@ = e
_ = e
# = e
+ = x
- = x
< = E
> = F
= = k
[ = s
] = z
\ = M
^ = v
{ = K
} = 5
~ = 5 (experimental)

fs ought

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

This was fun to do.
---Not liking the e and the s so much.
---While doing the sample, I found that even though the inter-character spacing is specifically set to one grid space wide, Photoshop was rendering the spacing differently per character pair. Same in Illustrator. Curious, I opened it in FontLab Studio. Turns out, the characters that have a half-wide brick left of the left edge in FontStruct are another half-brick-width over in the TrueType file. The sample is, therefore, manually kerned back to original.

fs Balance

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Something something...

fs Broken

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

PXL it.

fs Fontsration

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quickie to relieve some fontsration.

The limited uppercase are for roman numerals. The O is just for fun.

fs Dry Flat

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

For use at pixel level.
Also works at 32pt×x, where x=1,2,4,8,etc.
-----
This font has been a long time in the making. The dots are such that the curved shapes and squared-off letters just would not resolve to an equal height no matter what I tried. Then after the mixed x-height that came about in yesterday's la Cross, it occurred to me to just let the letters be as tall as they wanted to be. It seems to work for some odd reason. Can someone please explain why it works?

fs La Cross

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000