This is my font, and as you can see, it’s absolutely fontastic. I’ve always liked fonts that are odd and off the wall, things like Bobcat or X Files, so when I began designing my own font in Fontstruct, I wanted to make letters that were a bit exaggerated and imperfect. I’d say I’ve definitely succeeded in that.
I started by making each of my capital letters eight boxes high and eight boxes wide. I began with A, and once I finished the letter and had it the way I wanted it, I copied it, and would paste it into the grid of each new letter I was working on. This was a way for me to ensure that each of my letters was going to be proportional to the previous one. The same principal went for lowercase letters, which were four high and four wide. My making the lowercase half the height of the capital letters is a principle that can be seen on page 36 of Lupton’s Thinking With Type.
When I started fooling around with Fontstruct, I had a few ideas for my letters, but found that trying to translate what was in my head into the actual program proved to be a more difficult task than I initially anticipated. I goofed around until I created the A that I now have, which kind of looks like Pac Man, southbound, chasing after some delicious dots. Honestly, that’s the first thought that came into my head when I finished work on A and it kind of made me laugh, so I decided to make all my letters kind of rounded, bubbly, and thick to go along with the theme.
My font is more in the style of the Roman fonts, as Lupton points out on page 45. (Side note, I didn’t even think until after I’d already finished and downloaded my font that I would need numbers as well as the letters. That’s why in my printed-out version of this post that uses my font, I have to spell out all the numbers I write.) You can also see that my tracking is pretty even, but the space between letters is pretty wide, which would me more in the way of positive tracking, as Lupton points out on page eighty one. I did this because of the style that I created. The fat, rounded letters would have been too mushed together to read had I made the tracking any less. To see my full alphabet in all its glory, just click here.
(The early stages of capital G)
I also used Kuler to create a color palate. The picture I used is one that a friend of mine snapped on
Like some of my classmates, Gage’s discussion on the colors of social division was one that interested me. In my palate, you can see the red, gold, and blue colors, that were talked about in the book (red for freemen, gold for nobility, blue for slaves) but I liked that they weren’t too striking or bright, but rather more along the lines of a pastel. This also gives the colors a calming effect, which I found interesting because to me, the picture is very vivid and alive with color and is very striking, while the color palate, though based off the picture, looks a bit more subdued and placid.
