Typophile

Janaina Roman

hugocristo

Hello everybody.

This is Janaina, an attempt to design a text
font for reading on screen and printed media.

I'm designing it as my final project at college,
so any kind of comment will be very useful.

I didn't work spacing and kerning yet, so I'm
sorry I couldn't provide consistent examples of
the font in use.

I've tried to keep the x-height as large as
possible and avoided much thin/thick contrast
to help with low-resolution appearance, but I'm
still analyzing how those design decisions
would affect the overall readability.

'Q' is still very experimental, as well as font
diacritics. I'll have to work hard on that too,
because the font is intended to be used in
Portuguese language.

Thanks in advance,
hugocristo


application/x-shockwave-flashJanaina Roman
janainaroman.swf (7.4 k)

Hrant H Papazian

Real quick (for now):
1) I like your serifs.
2) Vertical proportions: shorten the descenders; you're effectively targeting about 7-8 point (in print).

hhp

eomine

ol

Rodolfo Capeto

Hugo, it seems that flash is wreaking havoc with your
curves, some of them look as if they've been cut with
scissors - at my end at least. It gets difficult to judge
the sort of abrupt, 'uncultivated' style of the characters,
the sort of inconsistency in stress and thickness of the
curves... Does it work? Does it look amateurish? Or is
it just a bug?

I agree with Eduardo about the proportions and the squarish
B. Also, the "midline" of B,E,F,H,R seems a bit too high.
Well, there are other problems to sort out, as you know.
I dig the Jj. I once designed one similar to this.

abra

hugocristo

Hrant:
Yes, shortening the descenders would be a nice
exercise too... I'll try that and post some
tests here.

Eduardo:
'B' is one of my favorite problems :-)... I'll
check 'S' and 'a' as well. Talking about reading
for screen, I meant both hinting and fixed-size
bitmaped fonts. I'm taking this way because
I'm working with type1 so I won't get accurated
screen hinting and I'll need that for web
applications (mostly shockwave, but I'm
considering MS WEFT too).

In fact I'm printing the font in large sizes
on transparent paper and then 'squaring' each
glyph to fit my intended size grid (8 to 14pt).
Dunno if that's the best way of doing it but
it's working for me.

Rodolfo:
I've attached a PDF example here. I hope it
doesn't look amateurish anymore :-)

The font is almost complete, so I think it's
to start refining each character. As soon as I
finish the figures I'll try to post some
improvements here.

Thanks again
hugocristo


application/pdfesp

Hrant H Papazian

> shortening the descenders would be a nice exercise too.

Sure, but then you'd be moving towards 6 point.

hhp

hugocristo

Here we go again:

- wider A
- narrower s
- new U/B/C/Q tail
- changed F/E arms a bit

And gosh... Spacing is driving me crazy. Are
there any references about spacing digital
type? I've got some texts from Briem and
Stephen Moye (Type by Design) but I think
I need something deeper.

cheers,
hugocristo


application/pdfNew Specimen
janaina roman typophile new.pdf (15.1 k)

Hrant H Papazian

Phil Baines and Andrew Haslam's "Type & Typography" includes the one good public spacing explanation (Tracy's). It's a good book otherwise too.

hhp

degregorio

the curvature of lc "a, s, n" its so different.
i see a lot of typefaces in a same alphabet.

the movement of the doctus don

Captured from web.archive.org on 17 Apr 2015. view this capture