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Notes from a Medium-Sized Island

Jason

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	[Dec. 13th, 2004\|09:14 pm] Jason
Sat by while the poor 312 students suffered through the 312 exam. It was pretty tough, but I think they did okay. We'll find out more exactly tomorrow morning when we grade it. So, at least up to a first cut, all the capitals are done. Least satisfying: H, I, J, V, W. U's not so incredible, but I could leave it as it is and still be able to sleep at night. The Z is weirdish, especially in the lower left. I can't quite stop fiddling with the S, since it's all curve, and I find curves the hardest to get looking right, but I'm actually pretty happy with it, relative to the models I've been deriving it from. Not pictured are numerals, which are coming along. The T, I like. Deriving the Y from the A (and the G's tail) worked better than I expected. Looking back at previously-done letters, I'm still very happy with the C and related glyphs. The Q also is a place where I really got to fight with whitespace to get just the right suggestion of a shape without saying it too loudly. The I and the J are too flimsy, still and the P and R are a little too dense. I may need to pull them up from below the baseline, but that will probably mean eliminating, or at least reducing, the ornamentation going on inside the bowl. The H just... doesn't say H to me. The S somehow I can forgive for being a weird, foreign sort of S that I'm not used to seeing. It's a nice, confident, something, which I can accept by suspension of disbelief as standing for the same thing as a roman S. Same with the (very U-ish to my roman-trained eye) A. The H, on the other hand, is little more than a D that broke its back falling down the stairs or something.
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Comments:

From:

modularformsboy
2004-12-14 02:37 am (UTC)

umm, you know, you're reinventing mathfrak, right?

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From:

ex_trurl
2004-12-14 02:46 am (UTC)

How so?

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From:

jcreed
2004-12-14 03:04 am (UTC)

Yeah, it's like he thinks the world doesn't need yet one more blackletter revival face or something.

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From:

jcreed
2004-12-14 03:13 am (UTC)

Or maybe he's accusing me of veering too close to mathfrak's style. Which might be valid. I avoided the traditional Y's in both cases, though, and eventually eschewed the weird, boofy lowercase k. Mathfrak's capitals are a bit more curvy.

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From:

modularformsboy
2004-12-14 03:40 am (UTC)

since it seems that i can't put an image here, see http://www.yak.net/random/4lj/mathfrak.jpg

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From:

jcreed
2004-12-14 05:30 am (UTC)

Yeah, there are definitely some differences... the A, B, C, E, K, S are structurally similar, but with a little denser ornamentation at the top left, and the C and E are more circular in mine. I think I may have to steal the skeleton of the I and J, but make the top more angular, like the arm of the L. The D, F, L, O, P, Q, T, and Y are all really made out of quite different subparts if you look at them. the L and the O have double stems in mine, single in mathfrak. My D is essentially a simplified B, but mathfrak's is its own thing. I kinda prefer mathfrak's style of D (I had seen it in a few other blackletter fonts I was looking at) but I was too lazy to attempt it. The sort of `double storey' P in mathfrak with those two strokes that meet each other in the bowl, I don't care for. Also the T. I like my T better. Mathfrak's R is fantastic, though.

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From:

ex_trurl
2004-12-14 04:55 pm (UTC)

Sure, there are similarities, but if you were to compare two typical Roman typefaces you will be even harder pressed to differentiate them.

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