3rd Artefact - Sans Serif Font - Evaluation

3rd Artefact Evaluation

(I originally did this font before easter, but since I can't upload it to the uni servers. I'm writing the evaluation now in preparation to upload it tomorrow. )

I personally think that this design is the weaker between the Sans-serif version and the Serif version. I don't believe the Sans-serif version looks as appealing and the serif version. Why this is I'm not sure, although I think It may have something to do with the adjusted widths and stroke lengths. 

This artefact has the unaltered stroke length. As in, the stroke length that the scanned in image had, this has caused problems because the scanned in image is so large, when reduced to a more mangeable size, the stroke thickness is changed. Additionally, i believe that some of the capitals don't neccessarily conform with the lower-case and will require a re-design.

There are several alterations I will make for my 4th artefact. First one being making sure the stroke thickness is the same for all characters, as upper-case and lower-case appear to differ in this aspect. Second change I will make will be to reduce the angle of the curves I have used for some letters, as well as the overall width to gain a more consistent appearance. In my next artefact I should take all these aspects into consideration, as well as how the serifs will affect the spacing of the letters as I will widen them by one stroke.  

Despite these changes, I will not be making any changes to the way I create the font as a whole, the only change I shall make is the addition of the serifs, which I will do in Illustrator. This is because the additional measuring required is inefficent compared to the amount of time it takes using the software.

Everitt Regular V3 -

Below are the edited version of Pixel V2, the second of my artefacts. Specifically, this is the sans-serif version of the font. I believe that this counts as one of my my artefacts, however this isn't the finished version.

I have made a few changes from Pixel V2, which I'll address now.

The first change I made was to remove the serifs that I had used in the previous version. These can be found in my older blog posts on letters such as a, b, d, g, etc. I was told by shaun to remove these as they are not consistent enough with the rest of the font. This was evident as some letters did not feature these additional serifs. Because of this removal I had to make some changes to the characters themselves, and re-design some of them, these can be seen below. I have not included them all, as there are around 18 glyphs that differ from the original. However these are the most notable.

 

 

I would like to explain that the grid is a different size because some of the originals weren't re-sized when they were made. However the x-height has not been adjusted for any of the characters. 

The majority of changes that I made were removing the serifs off the edges of the characters, to give them a more rounded appearance that was consistent with the overall style of the font. Other changes I made included:

• Some characters width being reduced. I decided that while keeping the curves constant, it was completely neccessary to have the same 'run-up' to the curve. Addtionally, by making them more squashed it meant that taller characters weren't so out of place alongside the wider ones. 
• The angle of curvature reduced/increased. Examples of this can be seen on the u above, where the inital curve takes a much wider angle as opposed to its predeccesor. I did this so that the changes I made to the shape helped the overall aesthetic of character remain consistent with the rest of the font. Other examples can be seen on the m and n characters. 
• Made the Upper-case more consistent in terms of how they relate to the lower-case character's x-height. For example, any horizontal lines that are used in the upper-case now sit directly above the x-height for all characters.

These are the changes I have made to the majority of characters, however there are still changes that I need to make in relation to the upper-case, explained below.

There are a few problems that I have noted while testing this from my own computer, mainly with the Upper-case glyphs. I believe that for the most part, the upper-case is the right height, but maybe could benefit if some of the characters were a smaller width. Additionally, I believe some characters will need to be completely re-designed in order to fit with the rest of the font in terms of how they are styled. Characters such as the upper-case N and M, do not fit with the way the rest of the font looks. They are too jagged and harsh, they do not fit with the rounded style of the font.

As you can see, below I have screenshots of what the font looks like when in size 10 and size 20. Some characters are too wide or too squashed. This is mainly evident within the lower-case.

I believe that this version of the font is an improvement on the last version, at smaller sizes the font looks readable, despite the inconsistencies between the appearance of upper-case and lower-case characters. I will update once I have re-designed and implemented these changes.

Everitt Pixel Regular is born - first font done

First aretfact is now done, before i do my evaluation, I should explain what happened between scanning the images in and being ready to import in to fontlab. 

As with all things when you start out with something new, you make time-consuming mistakes just down to inexperience. Such things have happened to me in the past 5 days. For example, it wasn't completely neccessary to draw each letter out by hand on a landscape piece of a4 beforehand. While they did act as a good reference point if I lost my way, the I could always look back and confirm anything i needed. 

As good as that is, I think next time I will spend less time on the drawings and depending on time, maybe not do them at all, as everything can be drawn in Illustrator and the path imported in to FontLab. Mainly because the a4 drawings are too large when they're scanned in to and subsequently take time to resize. I had to re-size every single character individually because of my error. They then need to be re-scaled with Fontlab in mind as some simple maths came in useful when calculating from points/millimeters to UPM (Unit Per Metre), which is the unit fontlab calculates size in. 

This required finding the em square of my font (ascender height + descender height). Initially I thought that the ascender is usually the same height or taller than the caps, but with my font the ascender was lower, which caused some confusion as I wasn't sure if I should use the caps height for em square as it is the tallest value. This is the maths that makes sure the font is the right size when it's finally generated. 

After resizing the characters so they are all in proportion, it's a case of copy and pasting the shapes from Illustrator to photoshop. No .eps file required, which I thought would be the case, but apparently not. 

Once the images are in Fontlab (and after altering the caps height, ascender height, x-height, and descender height in the options), all that has to be done is lining up the paths with the guides and setting the spacing bewteen each letter. However I was disapointed to find that I could only export in TrueType instead of my personal preference OpenType. 

Evaluation

Artefact 1 Evaluation – Daniel Everitt

Why did I chose the ideas that I did to make a font? They seemed like the easiest in terms of measuring things out, I didn't want to over-stretch myself with a font that was to difficult to produce.

One thing I believe would've enhanced my font, would be to make every stroke the same thickness. I used straight flat edges and differing measurements for stroke thickness. Different thickness’s could have been useful in a fluid font, but not for such a linear one. Because of this, you can pick out the varying strokes at small sizes, making my font clunky.

Another mistake I made, was neglecting using diagonal strokes, instead of purely horizontal and vertical strokes. You can see the difference between the capital V and the B. Next time I should try to visualize how the letter may look when they are decreased in size, and design accordingly.

I should have used more flexible letter widths. While I think this was partly a good decision for letters like m & w, it also meant that some characters are negatively effected by it like the c, a, y and z. Next time I should research in to character widths and find out if there are equations that would calculate the appropriate width. Failing that, do what looks good.

I also miscalculated the x-height of the i & j characters. The top of the stems should be level with each other. The descender looks squashed, which might indicate wrong measurements.

Next time, I will know that my measurements must be finer, and the decisions I make must consider the overall aesthetic of the font, I think that this time around I was focused on the wrong things, and therefore neglected the basic essentials.