Spright: Yet Another Mythologically-Named Venetian

jafo4 January 2015 · 10:12

Hello. Spright is based on a Centaur /E, and every glyph is full of irregular, organic curves that unfortunately only come across in higher magnification; perhaps darkening the glyphs would help. I've tried to keep each letter unique, without factory-style assemblage from other letters, but again, these details are obscured at normal sizes. Maybe it's best to see Spright as a modernized Jenson. Circular dots are the default, but I do have cruciforms available in SS01. The caps are lighter than normal, to give a more even color to the page. The numerals are monospaced, semi-hanging; proper OSF are coming. I also have alternate, more separated forms of /AE and /OE; blame it on a spec sheet for Berthold's Palatino BQ.

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Spright 2015-01-04.pdf	18.25 KB

John Savard4 January 2015 · 23:27

Well, it looks very nice, but it has one characteristic to which I object.

If it's intended to be "modernized", which I take to mean that it's intended to be usable in present-day typography, rather than going all-out for authenticity, then I think that the extension of the crossbar on the lower-case "e" past the body of the letter to the right is much too prominent to be consistent with the usability of the face.

I'm happy to accept some slightly eccentric touches in a Venetian, like diamond tittles (which may warm Hrant's heart), and some slight protrusion on the e (about 1/4 to 1/5 of what you have) might also be all right, but I really think this will be too limiting to the applicability of the typeface. However, my opinion isn't to be taken too seriously on its own, as I am no expert in these matters, just an interested layperson.

However, looking at some existing Venetians, specifically Centaur itself and Eusebius, they had extensions on the e, but those were significantly smaller than in your face.