Intone - MA Typeface Design

For the top image
Negative Remarks:
1. The break of the stem creates a
typeface than leans to the left.
2. The instroke of “a” doesn’t fit
with the rest.
3. “a”, “d”, “e”, “s” and “g” need
to follow the inclination of the
upstroke of the “n”.
4. The bottom serif of the “d”
makes the letter too dark.
5. The junctions are too high.
6. The pattern need less contrast
7. “z” has too many features.
8. “g” is too complicated.
2.5 New decisions, new conclusions new mix and matching of features:
A process that never ends
The character set was there. I had to expand it, but the base was solid. In an imaginary world
all I would have to do was press the “perfection” button and that would be it. But in our real
world this was only the beginning of new problems and challenges. I soon realized (as you
can see in the footnote of each drawing) that my character sets lacked uniformity. As Gerry
would say: “You are not going to like what I’m about to tell you, but it seems as if you were
designing every character in a different day with a different mood”. I wanted my characters
to be unique, but I had gone overboard. As Mathew Carter would say: “the aim is not a group
of beautiful letters, but a beautiful group of letters, is what is essential for legibility”. That
served as my motto for the following steps.
3. Towards uniformity, clarity and extension
3.1 My characters are dancing to all directions
3.1.1 Creating a consistent Regular
adzesiong
adzesiong
final form of adhesion
One of the problems I encountered was that my Regular text was “dancing” too much. Each
character had too much of a personality, disrupting the flow of reading by creating a messy
pattern. In addition, the Regular, Italic and Greek looked like separate typefaces. With a
closer look I realized that this was due to some characters lacking common features.
However, I had to make the horizontal alignment work before anything else. Once the
letters would work next to each other, I started modifying the spacing. It was then that I
comprehended how important spacing is; it would clearly demonstrate the problems.
Zooming out from micro-typographical details enabled me to better understand the problem.
I decided to introduce the strong diagonal allure to all of my characters and to distort
the weight in the same manner for all of them. Moreover, I added more corners to my inner
curves to make some characters match (e.g. “o”, “n”).
The creation of the Capitals and the Small caps was a straightforward process, although I
spent some time on the letters “E”, “F”, “L” and “T” before coming up with a solution for the
serifs on the horizontal stems. Afterwards, I developed the Bold. It was spaced tighter than
the Regular to ensure homogeny between the counters and the space among the letters.
After fixing the Greek Upright Italic I worked on my Regular Greek, making sure that they
are more distinct. I rounded the outstrokes and sharpened the instrokes to better resemble
the Latin.
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