I made a font
66 points by op
66 points by op
Author of the post here. Would love to hear some feedback, and happy to answer any questions!
I like it a lot!
One little nit from a fellow font nerd: If your italic simply adds an angle, it’s an oblique rather than a true italic (to be a true italic, it needs to have some different letterforms - typically things like cursive-style f and single-storey a and g).
I pretty much agree with your difficulty tier list for glyphs, with the exception that I’d place s in S-tier too - especially for fonts outside the “blocky” aesthetic, but personally I’ve had a hard time with the s glyph in every font I’ve designed.
If your italic simply adds an angle, it’s an oblique
Whoops, TIL!
I’d place s in S-tier too - especially for fonts outside the “blocky” aesthetic
I think I got very lucky then! Perhaps going for monospaced + blocky made it an easy first typeface.. now I’m looking forward to making a “normal” one.
The first font I made was a complex humanist serif, with a few bits and pieces inspired from Renaissance letterforms and some from early 20th Century Czech typography, specifically the wonderful works of Oldrich Menhart. Unfortunately, I was in way over my head and created something that was too unruly and self-contradictory for its own good. I also made a monospace that inadvertently ended up looking mostly like a cheap knockoff of Letter Gothic - I never released either of those two, but my former students did get to read some lecture notes set in terrible homemade typography for a while. The monospace served as my day-to-day programming font for a couple of years, where it kept annoying me enough to provide inspiration for its replacement.
My latest font is tentatively named Phelsuma Mono (sample png) - I should get my act together and clean it up for a public release at some point. You can see some of my italic-isms in a, e, f, i, k, l and y here. I’ve tried to go for a vaguely 1970s-1980s computerish look, with rounded terminals and little-to-no modulation, but clean enough that I can actually use it for daily terminal and programming use. :-)
Very neat. TIL about the Poggendorff Illusion.
For example, d, p, q are pretty much just flipped variants of b.
Should they be, though? A little variation between them might be useful for legibility and/or dyslexia? I don’t actually know, I’m asking. Hard to do simply without serifs, though.
Should they be, though?
No, it’s definitely not a best practice - in fact I’m pretty sure it is an antipattern. But I’m cutting myself some slack since it’s my first typeface, plus I think they turned out okay-ish, so I got lucky there.
There’s at least some research into the dyslexia aspect: https://dyslexiefont.com/en/research/
That’s quite a nice typeface! Impressive as a debut.
This article makes me nostalgic— my first real job was implementing a typeface design app for a long-gone company that wanted to digitize their [metal] font library. It ran on Mac IIs with about 2MB RAM, and the OS had zero support for Bézier curves or fancy polygon fills so I had to do a ton of stuff from scratch. My co-worker M@ designed an incomplete typeface with it in his spare time, but I never felt comfortable enough drawing to attempt it.
implementing a typeface design app for a long-gone company that wanted to digitize their [metal] font library. It ran on Mac IIs with about 2MB RAM
That’s pretty cool. Did you write it in pascal or something?
THINK C. That was the last time I wrote anything significant in C!
It breaks rules that I look out for, especially things like differentiating forms rather than just rotating them, and I have a strong preference for m with a short middle leg, but it was really very pleasant and clear to read in the post. I didn’t find it tiring in any way and didn’t have to focus hard to read the content.
I think the ease of comprehension here, for me, is super impressive. Thank you!
It looks great. I was happy to see that zero was distinct from uppercase O, and 1 from lowercase L etc
I bet it took you at least 10× longer than you thought it would … even the trivial fonts I’ve made took days and days of work.
Looks like you did a great job of minimizing control points and ensuring control points at maxima. The latter point, while not as critical as it used to be, can help with hinting. Points at maxima helped really old rasterizers to calculate the size of the character without flattening the splines.
I bet it took you at least 10× longer than you thought it would
Yes, there’s so many characters to draw!
minimizing control points and ensuring control points at maxima
Thanks for noticing! The tutorials on the Glyphs 3 website and lots of online videos advocate for these practices, so I try my best.
Creating an italic font, on the other hand, was surprisingly easy. Slanting the base (regular/bold) font by 7 degrees from the baseline worked out of the box.
Pedant here wants to say that’s an oblique, rather than an italic. A “true italic” uses different designs for at least some of the glyphs (sometimes radically different; it’s funny how when it’s done well readers don’t even notice). But for a sans, an oblique tends to look pretty good.
A “true italic” uses different designs for at least some of the glyphs
Yes, I noticed that for some of the typefaces I use like Jetbrains Mono the a, f, y look very different. I’ll try that out soon
I like it!
At first glance, the font reminded me of Berkeley Mono, perhaps because of the squarish look that is common to both
I must say, they have an amazing landing page.
Their website is amazing. It is well-designed throughout, from their maintenance notices to their license page and their tickets.
As a font addict, I approve of this.
Currently rocking Berkeley Mono, I’ll give your font a go and see how I like it! Thanks for sharing!
Have now used it all morning, I love it!
Awesome! How does it compare to Berkeley Mono? Curious to know since another comment mentioned their similarity
It’s definetely on the same vibe, but I actually find your slightly more readable due to the wider characters.
I miss the ligatures, but considering your font is free, I don’t expect them either!
If I had to describe your font I would say it’s a mix between SanFranisco Mono and Berkeley Mono.
I’m also a Berkeley Mono user, and I don’t use their ligatures, so I’m thinking about at least giving this a try. It does read very pleasantly in your post. “Only 95 glyphs” scares me a little but I can try using it with Berkeley Mono as a fallback and see if I even notice :)
Oh, and just a data point about my personal foibles: after a couple years of using Berkeley Mono Bold as a terminal font because I found the regular weight too light, I figured out that what really made me happy was a semibold (wght=600). Not quite as fragile-looking as the regular, but a bit more breezy than the bold, and also means that if something asks for bold there’s a weight difference (even if it’s only slight).
Opus One seems a little heavier; it feels about as dark at wght=500 or 550 as Berkeley Mono does at 600. That’s not a complaint, I can make them play together.
What is a complaint: the counter of the lowercase “e” seems too small to me at weights 500 and up, and makes it hard to identify.
Looks nice. Personally, I find JetBrains Mono to be the most pleasant coding font I ever worked with. Of course, this is subjective and relative to each person.
