Missed this one back in July when you posted Christian. I am surprised no one has commented yet. I love it. your a's are signature, no mistaken who designed it. please BJ, Hrant, Stephen and Joe... jump in and lets discuss this excellent font.

It won't display on my machine.

hhp

I can't get it to display either. I just get a blank browser page.

David

Works here. Maybe you need Flash 6?
I'll have more time to comment later.

> Maybe you need Flash 6?

Maybe it needs to be exported in Flash4.

hhp

i can see it, but it cuts off like this.

I like the a. What I'm more intrigued with is the process, using beziers as the starting point and pulling them out into their forms.

I think this was discussed in another thread.

What might be a fun discussion is the methodology / process of creating a text face.

Maybe Hrant, Kent, Jacques, David, Christian, John Butler and others who have put together successful text faces can give us some insight as to where they start (fontographer, illustrator) and how they work. Is it all pen tool operations, or are there other methods, like Christian's.?

bj

That "g"!!
Christian, full showing, *please*!

hhp

I guess it is flash 6. My Macromedia stock is worth one tenth what it used to be. Help me get my money back:

Download the flash player here (it's fast, easy, and free, and for crying out loud, help my clients who are terrified to use flash)

Otherwise,

no_26 viewer no_26_viewer.swf (12 k)

Christian - Still cut off. Is it supposed to end at 'i'?

This design presents a dilemma.
To me the centerpiece is the "g" (although it could just be me) - it can be argued that the join between the bowls (in the traditional bicam structure) is superfluous, and you've gotten rid of it very nicely: on its own your glyph looks like a legitimate alphabetic character.

The question is, how much of that approach do you apply to the other letters? The "a" works well, and the "p" has merit, but if you take it too far the font might become a parody. In fact it's not inconceivable to me to make *only* the "g" unorthodox, and build the rest as a traditional text face. The interesting result might be a font that some people will discredit as half-baked, some people will love without knowing -or caring- why, and *everybody* will have something to saw about that "g" - in part a promotional trick that Carter often mentions as Spiekermann having revealed to him (concerning Meta, although it could very well have been post-rationalization).

If you do that, you must not provide a traditional "g" as an alternate.

hhp

There has been some discussion in these forums about faces that have only one or two odd-ball characters. It seems that some don't like them, but I really do. It seems like a good way to push the boundries of what's acceptable. They also makes for really interesting text faces, I think. I don't think that the 'speed bump' created by some wacky characters really causes a problem, if they are done right. For some reason g's and Q's give a lot of room for expression, but I also really like the 'a' and the 'k' for their expressive potential.

I am undecided about the a and the p, to be completely honest. They almost seem contrived, like they are an excuse to keep the g that I like so much. I don't think that I would provide an alternate g, though I did right here...

Note to BJ- I think you still have a flash 4 player. You can upgrade quickly and easily with the link in my last post.

> I think. I don't think that the 'speed bump' created by some wacky characters really causes a problem, if they are done right.

Exactly. They become not speed bumps, but "feedback" from the road to the driver.

Could you set some text in this?

> a and the p, to be completely honest. They almost seem contrived, like they are an excuse to keep the g that I like so much.

Yeah, that's just what I was worried about.

hhp