fontstruct - shoutout

After writing about names for imaginary fonts, I have finally had the chance to create one, as per the banner above me. Fontshop, where I indulge my love of fonts, has just released a web-based font creation tool, FONTSTRUCTION. Rather than being vector based, it is tile based, but there is a large and growing selection of tiles available, and after all, constraints are the mother of creativity. Once you have created an account, and logged in, both easy, it is then incredibly easy to play around and create individual letters. There are a variety of character sets available for your font, so it is possible to create something pretty professional. Once finished, you can make your font available to all and sundry, and even download it as a truetype font to your own computer.

HOW COOL IS THAT.

So, I have been distracting myself lately developing my first font, straphanger. Basically, I just started at A, overshot slightly as I was laying it out, but quite liked how it had turned out, so I just carried on with the rest of the alphabet to match. I tried to keep it simple, down to just three tile types. There are a few little flourishes, and some idiosyncracies, so I cannot claim that it is high in legibility. However, hopefully the individual letter shapes are appealing, in particular the upper case ones.

I have taken inspiration from the Operina font, which uses very ornate upper case letters, and high ascenders in the lower case, as well as one of the Rian Hughes fonts, where the upper and lower case are similar, but there is a slight stylistic variation to mark that they are different. One of the appealing things with Operina is that it is nice to look at, but not always very legible, which is not necessarily a bad thing sometimes.

I've published straphanger now so that it is available to all and sundry, though it might well still be a work in progress. There is always a little more tinkering to be done with these things.

Having done one very pixilated font, I should try something a little more mainstream next, or maybe do a dingbats set. Anyway, safe to say, I will be playing with Fontstruct for some time to come.