Really well balanced, solid and beautiful typeface. Do you intend to add italics as well?
Thanks! I was planning to add a medium and thin version, but I'm not familiar with creating italics. Before I can extend this family, I need to find out more about creating various weights and complementary talics. If I have enough spare time I will look into that.
Grappig dat er naar verhouding zo veel nederlanders actief zijn op het gebied van (type) design!
Grappig dat er naar verhouding zo veel nederlanders actief zijn op het gebied van (type) design!
I usually start with Regular and from that design the two extremes (Black and Thin for example) so you can automatically generate the weights in between by using these 3 masters. Italics are fairly easy to produce for a sans serif. If you design your type in Illustrator you can use the slant tool to give all letters a slant of about 7 to 10° and I usually horizontally condense these letters by 2%. Now you basically have a finished Oblique style. With a few adjustments and drawing italic characters for a few glyphs like a, e, f and g you got your Italic.
Het is inderdaad een interessant gegeven dat er zoveel Nederlandse lettertype ontwerpers zijn. Vreemd is het echter niet helemaal; Nederland is altijd al een belangrijk land geweest betreft lettertypes. Heb jij ambitie om er je vak van te maken?
Het is inderdaad een interessant gegeven dat er zoveel Nederlandse lettertype ontwerpers zijn. Vreemd is het echter niet helemaal; Nederland is altijd al een belangrijk land geweest betreft lettertypes. Heb jij ambitie om er je vak van te maken?
Thanks for sharing your design process. I always thought that every individual letter had to be manually adjusted when creating an italic (also when slanting letters), because it results in uneven line thickness. Or is this problem reduced when you condense it by 2%? Thanks again for your reply.
Ik heb niet direct de ambitie om type designer te worden, hoewel ik het maken van dit lettertypen leuk en interressant vond.
Ik heb niet direct de ambitie om type designer te worden, hoewel ik het maken van dit lettertypen leuk en interressant vond.
Adjustments need to be made after interpolating a weight from 2 masters. For a Grotesque typeface you can just slant the whole typeface at once (if you have it in Illustrator that is) turning it into an Oblique. Design a one-story 'a' and 'g' and you pretty much have an italic already. I personally still like to adjust letters though but it won't be anything dramatic. I mean, if you design a serif italic then the process is a lot more complicated then adding a slant and replacing a few glyphs. With a humanist sans serif you might also play a bit with different slants for different characters just like in the oldstyle serif italics but for a Grotesque I like to keep it quite simple.
As for condensing by 2%, this is not a practice I really like to advice because in principle it's bad. If you auto condense a character horizontally, the vertical strokes will become thinner while the horizontal strokes stay thick, thus messing up the letters. This is especially lethal to serif fonts because they have even more horizontal strokes. The reason why I auto condense my sans serif italics by 2% is because I still like my italic to be ever so slightly thinner and more narrow. I condense it by only 2% so the effect I just explained won't show. I could manually condense and thin the characters but that takes quite a lot of time. If the effect were to show up in characters with horizontal or vertical strokes I would of course adjust the letters. As long as the end result looks beautiful and consistent I don't mind breaking rules in type design. I think it's the rule-breaking which allows progress and change.
Hoezo heb je eigenlijk een lettertype gemaakt? Was het een school opdracht?
As for condensing by 2%, this is not a practice I really like to advice because in principle it's bad. If you auto condense a character horizontally, the vertical strokes will become thinner while the horizontal strokes stay thick, thus messing up the letters. This is especially lethal to serif fonts because they have even more horizontal strokes. The reason why I auto condense my sans serif italics by 2% is because I still like my italic to be ever so slightly thinner and more narrow. I condense it by only 2% so the effect I just explained won't show. I could manually condense and thin the characters but that takes quite a lot of time. If the effect were to show up in characters with horizontal or vertical strokes I would of course adjust the letters. As long as the end result looks beautiful and consistent I don't mind breaking rules in type design. I think it's the rule-breaking which allows progress and change.
Hoezo heb je eigenlijk een lettertype gemaakt? Was het een school opdracht?
ok
Nee, het was een geheel vrijwillig project
Nee, het was een geheel vrijwillig project