If you're going for the hand-scribbled-on-the-front-of-a-phone-book-with-a-ball-point-pen look, I think you've nailed it.

yeah... something like that
(I didn't scribble it in the first place though, so I take no credit for the characthers... I just made them sort of legible. hehe.)

Hey, this is actually pretty cool!
Like on that Rasta background it really works.

hhp

yeah, it takes some manual post processing to make it look cool, I just love that background.
I don't think it's that good ín mono-mode though.
I was thinking of extending the "typeface" by giving it variations where the shadows are scribbled in and so on, good idea?

hey, does the "i" after "good" in my previous post look funny? It looks like the dot over the i is slanted... how strange.

I'd make an animated version, where each letter pulsates or something. TV shows would lap it up.

hhp

yeah, that would be funny

I'd suggest sharpening some of the corners, the center of the "W" is really rounded and mushy like dough that has risen. If you sharpened off one or both corners, it may add an element of inconsistency (this is a good thing for this font)

Other letters that may benefit from some randum sharpening are the "M", the "N" and the "S"

Stuart :D

good point. I'll do that.

How on earth do you make an animated font?

Well, there's no animated font *format*, but you can use something like Animated-GIF for the web. Or if you want vector stuff, you can use VRML, but the plug-in's rare.

hhp

VRML? Isn't that the hyped-in-96-but-dead-now 3d format for the web?
Anyway, I really liked that idea, and I'm working hard on a animated font solution... We need that, c 'mon, how about an animated Gill sans? Where the "o" rolls around... hilarious!

Was it ever really alive? Who knows.
But I think SVG is going down the same path, so I can't recommend that. Maybe Flash, if it can be automated. From what I've heard about that new MX version, it might do the trick. And then there's Generator, but...

hhp

Flash can do just about anything you want...you just have to do a bit of hard slog. There was a nice demonstration of animated bubble fonts somewhere on this board...
Matthew

Director is even more powerful.
But the Shockwave plug-in has only about half the penetration of Flash. :-(

hhp

You can still do some retty neat things with Flash... originally my pixel font pixelon existed solely within flash - I hard-coded each character and wrote a display algorithm before realizing that I could use a truetype font and it would be much faster. Also, the new drawing api in MX makes 3d rendering much easier, as you can now draw surfaces. As an example, check out http://www.become.co.uk/3d2.swf.
This can have applications in simple 3d text extrusion.
MX rocks! (at least, in terms of what you can do with it, not in terms of the layout which I personally feel stinks)

Matthew