Dear Patric, I hope I'm not too harsh on you here, but to be honest I can understand why it hasn't been a great commercial success. I'm afraid it reminds me of the many free fonts available on those 'free fonts' sites. Aesthetically I don't think that it's sophisticated enough to warrant a price tag. Perhaps you should just give it away?

Hi, Patric. First off, I should state that I like your typefaces. My own early attempts at drawing typefaces have been mostly in the modular/geometric mode. At least you finished and released yours!

That said, one thing about minimalist, geometric faces is that there are many, many variations out there at this point... Saturation might be one reason no one has purchased a copy so far... Or maybe this collection is not different enough, to the untrained eye, from other, similar faces, such as (to give but one example) Die Typonauten's Nautilo Font System.

Perhaps you should just give it away?

Or give away a weight or two, a la FontShop... Mark Simonson had a couple of fonts that he gave away on his site, a few years ago.

clauses, this is critique, not eviscerate from behind a keyboard. i could just as easily say that your humanist sans are worthless because they look like a million other faces out there in the same genre. but if i did so, be just as unthinking in saying it as you are.

Actually... giving one weight away might be clever.

You know 3 or 4 years ago was the high point for the turgid love of Dutch style text faces. So the release timing wasn't ideal in that sense. Did you promote it? Also, what has been said about it being a crowded market for this kind of thing is true. Nautilo Font System is a solid example. I like yours a bit better but the point is valid all the same. Ricardo, Nice one.

At the risk of being insensitive myself - in some ways though - either it sells or not. You can work on it some more I suppose, or make the next font. Surely making the next one is sweeter. No?

My 1st reaction is some of it is tastier than other bits - that is to say it isn't equally good all the way through I think. Similarly I think the italic is more neat-o than the roman. But, do you just want a general reaction sort of thing or...? I have to admit I am not sure what you want to get out of this.

But maybe I am missing the point.

Time out. Patrick are you serious?
You asked for an opinion, Clauses gave you an honest one- a well thought out opinion free of sarcasm.

My opinion is just as well thought out, but much more to the point:
The fonts you've designed are ugly and expensive for what they are. Tho, the metrics look far better than a 'free font'.

I find it telling that even less successful or novice designers come to typophile asking "give me your toughest" or "let me have it" whereas polite but direct criticism sets you off. Your being so quick to be offended is counterproductive to your growth as a type designer. I think you know what good design is. The Pentagram website is certainly very good. I also had a gander at the PDF of the House of Pretty portfolio- very well done. Interestingly, I did not see any of your fonts in use there. And why is that Patrick?...

I know you are not asking for a specific course of action but I'm gonna give it to you anyway:

-drop the price of all your fonts to 9.99 or less

-make a pdf showing the repertoire and usage examples (like house industries does with their fonts in their print catalogs). Use colorful and playful graphics so we can see the potential.

- change the icon/preview on myfonts site to reflect that- it will spark more interest

- put the fonts on sale too and you will get customers fast

Before you let me have it, I understand your work is personal to you and should be but, use our honesty to your advantage. Sour grapes is not you.

I really do wish you the best. :-)

Mike Diaz

PS... Emphasize Gia and Fast Girls as these are your most attractive designs.

I wont go in to design details, but:

If you did all the accented characters that are needed in a standard font, perhaps someone would buy it? There are a lot of missing characters in your fonts. For instance, no one in Sweden could use it as it dont contain å ä ö – which is part of the standard Mac OS Roman encoding.

It could also be some encoding error on the fonts, since a lot of letters doesnt show up either on the typetester on Myfonts, or in the character set list, if you in fact have designed a full set of glyphs.

Patric, please take my comments in good humour. I'm in a good mood, but I'm of British descent and the traditonal penchant for satire and sarcasm is in my blood. Don't take it personally.

* For the extent of design and degree of visual stimulation on offer, the typeface design itself is not good value for money at $35.00 per weight.
Also try: funding an elephant with a serious cocaine habit.

* The market for this type of thing is small and its potential range of uses limited. To get sales it desperately needs to be much better value for money.

* $15 per weight, with matching italic in each package, would be a "good" price to sell it at and an appealing way to market it. Compare with my Primex face---at $15 for the regular plus oblique Primex is a tepid albeit steady seller. Much simpler in design than Commodity, Primex has an effective marketing concept behind it, complete with persuasive font flag and shafty blurb. Also try: luring vigins into an enourmous wicker basket and torching it.

* Incomplete Western 1252 character sets send buyer interest straight off a vertical cliff face.

* Family lacks a regular weight, jumping from light to medium.

* Interpolation of the bold and extra-bold weights, featuring some letters with clogged counters, is the kind of product the roach-baited font-buying public avoids. Not worthy of pretend consideration. The moment they see it Myfonts customers will quickly move on to discounted real fonts.

* The font flag doesn't help.

j a m e s

okay. first off, i owe clauses an apology. "Aesthetically I don’t think that it’s sophisticated enough to warrant a price tag" is a really hard thing to see as the first comment on a design that i know is sound. it offended me because i wouldn't have said something like that to anyone unless i really disliked them.

the face is actually using the forms common to freeware releases and combining those with handwritten italic forms on purpose. the face was designed in 2001-2002, when geometric forms weren't as out of fashion as they are now, and i'm aware that the visual vocabulary is straight out of trash typography. during that period i used forms from youth culture vernaculars because i liked giving them a full range of expression through a full character set.

that said, the character map is actually complete. myfonts support told me their OTF rasterizer sometimes didn't work, but i should probably regenerate the files myself. these were generated at thirstype for the initial release. the person who made the files was having trouble with them at the time.

this was designed as an overhaul to revenant, which still sells like hotcakes almost twelve years after its release, and which i can't stand. it was designed in 24 hours and looks it, yet sells like crazy. i thought commodity would be a great answer to it since it expands a great deal on the vocabulary and makes it more usable—but nyet. that's why i'm confused about its lack of sales. it seems like it would, since it expands upon the forms so much.

Revenant has a stronger flavor - a clearer purpose to my eye than commodity does. Commodity may be existing in between sweet spots of utility. The one being Display & the other text.

that makes sense, considering this particular face was the last display face i designed. at that point i was beginning to lose my taste for display entirely, so it does follow that's neither here nor there.

ismyfonthotornot.com

Patric: Whether you agree with what's been posted or not, you are receiving some extremely valuable feedback here.

I can't really say I find Commodity appealing, but then again I don't find any fonts in this classification/genre appealing so I do not count. I can see how those who appreciate this kind of type would find it attractive so I don't believe you created the e-coli of the typography world. However, after reading your posts carefully I was able to pick up on a few things which I'll run past you now and let you determine what they are worth. And these things have nothing to do with the actual font itself.

1.) Stripped to its core, selling is all about convincing. However, the bottom line is I'd neither seen nor even heard of "Commodity" until now. That said, I really couldn't be convinced to buy it then now could I? It's your job to both alert me of the font's existence AND convince me to buy it somehow. (By 'me' I mean ordinary people in general). I'd previously heard of "House of Pretty," a name I actually like very much. It's just not a name I've heard on a routine basis, if more than once or twice in my life. PROMOTE!

2.) All of your flags on myfonts.com are left-hook red (view: http://www.myfonts.com/foundry/pretty/). Not only is red a color you want to avoid when attempting to win people over, in one's initial, 1.3-second glance it makes all your fonts look exactly the same. Which then means a person's immediate (and perhaps subconscious) impression is you lack a capacity or desire to be flexible. So not only has red turned "me" off, you better hope I liked something about whatever font I did look at first because I'm almost immediately going to assign my initial impression to the remaining four I did not peruse. Sadly, that also goes for if I didn't like the first one I saw. In this case, three of the five require more than just a casual glance to realize they're not identical. Obviously this is not the be-all and end-all of your stated problem, but I can't imagine it being an advantage.

On the other hand, if you mix up the view of the flags a bit, use some blues and transparencies and treat it as though you are using your font to promote something other than your font, you will win more of those critical initial moments of impression than you'll lose. And I thought Mike Diaz's suggestions, specifically his second one, were outstanding.

3.) What struck me most in your posts was something with which I also have extreme difficulty; that being, just because you "love" your font doesn't mean everyone will, or should. To me it sounds as though you designed at least this font - if not more - solely for what YOU find appealing. When it comes to living life, it's the only way to go. Making money, on the other hand, is quite different.

Is this approach a crime? Of course not. However, when you unload on someone providing an honest opinion on your work, your interest in pleasing yourself rather than making money resounds like a cannon. Design of all kinds, regardless of the arena, is a see-saw struggle between remaining 100 percent true to your own appreciations and principles and receiving a consistent stream of financial reward.

While I admire and appreciate self-confidence and self-assurance, I find self-awareness to be a far more valuable trait.

For whatever this was worth ...

Patric: Whether you agree with what’s been posted or not, you are receiving some extremely valuable feedback here.

i've actually only disagreed with one thing said. but the rest has been interesting.

However, the bottom line is I’d neither seen nor even heard of “Commodity” until now.

probably for a couple of good reasons. i don't think my former foundry promoted it much, if at all. and i've only just rereleased a few months ago.

Not only is red a color you want to avoid when attempting to win people over

(..?)

and treat it as though you are using your font to promote something other than your font, you will win more of those critical initial moments of impression than you’ll lose. And I thought Mike Diaz’s suggestions, specifically his second one, were outstanding.

i was sort of thinking the same.

that being, just because you “love” your font doesn’t mean everyone will, or should.

you're reading a lot into my intentions, and overthinking it. i didn't say that i expect everyone to like it. just someone.

that it's sitting there unused seems really weird in the light of some of the other work on that page. even mettle, astoundingly, sells every once in a while. (again, i'm going to reiterate that all of this work is strictly back-catalog stuff—the reason nothing new is up is that i've been working on getting all the old work available.)

i have to say, more than anything i think it's probably a lack of any idea of how to use the thing (see: diaz' suggestion about PDFs, yours about font flags) combined with what looks like an incomplete character map.

I think this is where some of the other posts come in; you mentioned you didn't expect "everyone to like it. just someone."

I feel certain more than a few someones have liked and even wanted your typeface . . . just not for $35, unfortunately. I have zero guess of the ACTUAL reason this font has yet to be purchased; in fact no one ever will know for certain. However, there seem to be all kinds of little things you could do to improve the chances of it being sold at this price, and in this same version.

For example, I mentioned those blinding red flags displaying your fonts on the myfonts.com site, which you used for Commodity as well.

I must say I have looked far and wide and still have not encountered a single rule or law preventing you from taking a digital camera out to the more trendy, populated spots where you live and taking a picture of the biggest billboard you can find. After which you could - via Photoshop - erase the entire contents of the billboard and come up with your own fictional company . . . which just so happens to use your typeface as the center of its image. Once finished you then could size, display and/or distribute the finished product in the manner you find most appropriate or effective.

While such a thing probably wouldn't be striking being displayed in the size of a myfonts.com flag, I think you get the idea I'm trying to get across here. Perhaps you could use an especially striking store window, or whatever . . . anything that would not cross infringement lines. For that matter you could find an empty billboard or window of a failed business somewhere and use those.

Obviously this would require some functional knowledge of Photoshop or other similar program, but not an obscene amount. What I think this does is places your typeface in a more recognizable, impressive light because, for all intents and purposes, "Commodity" - to many people - actually would be a typeface businesses use on billboards, etc. . . . which to them automatically makes it great. There are tons of people out there who don't buy things because they don't trust their own assessment abilities or even their own taste; confirmation for them could come easy just by seeing someone really important likes your font too.

The truth is there aren't an overflow of people who would go check out whether or not your pseudo-business existed, especially if it's a billboard in Europe or the front of some insanely expensive technology store, etc. And even if someone did cry foul, you simply explain that you display these images to give potential clients the best view possible of how your typeface would look in situations that client may one day face. I just don't believe it would be fair to consider such a tactic unethical under any circumstances barring any potential copyright violations; it's actually done all the time with proposals for corporate stationery and so forth . . . you'd just be doing it in a little different way.

Besides, it wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that some of the industry's larger and more ff-famous vendors are similarly creative in various ways. But this is just one of countless little tweaks that you could consider not just for this font, but anything really. I know at least in my case, had your font been presented in a way similar to that described above, my initial interest in it would have been much greater.

There are tons of people out there who don’t buy things because they don’t trust their own assessment abilities or even their own taste; confirmation for them could come easy just by seeing someone really important likes your font too. [...] I just don’t believe it would be fair to consider such a tactic unethical under any circumstances

It's a lie. Under most circumstances, it's considered unethical to lie.

Besides, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that some of the industry’s larger and more ff-famous vendors are similarly creative in various ways

Ah. You have an agenda.

Even if this were true, just because other people do questionable things doesn't make it okay for the rest of us to do them.

"Commodity may be existing in between sweet spots of utility. The one being Display & the other text."
Really? Commodity may also be existing between spots of utility and not. The regular has collection points in the intersections until it becomes "too black for counters". The italic cannot be used with the regular because it's too bold. There are several illegible characters. There is a l.c. width issue as weight increases that make the lowercase wider and darker than the caps. The spacing is just wrong. The text description of the face is deconstructive to a buyers trust, e.g. it is not "purely geometric", and there is no visible relationship between the face and most anything your average Joe would think of as "handwritten". If I were trying to sell this face I would make these and other changes and do so with a clarity of purpose and the joyful knowledge (since it has not sold), that I'm not going to be upsetting anyone.

I hope Commodity Take Two, or Commodity Mark II or Commodity Priceless happens, because nothing of this scope should be abandoned. I'm sorry if this is tactical tips, "what I would do..." but I'm not much good to you otherwise.

Cheers!

Ah. You have an agenda.

meh. everyone has an agenda. but i do think this idea sounds shady unless it's used to fuel a larger message with a greater truth behind it (and therefore makes it obvious that the scene was staged). thanks for it, though.

to be honest, my question mark was to ask exactly where it's proven that red is a wrong color to use to attract someone. that's a weird thing to say.

Commodity may also be existing between spots of utility and not. The regular has collection points in the intersections until it becomes “too black for counters”. The italic cannot be used with the regular because it’s too bold. There are several illegible characters. There is a l.c. width issue as weight increases that make the lowercase wider and darker than the caps. The spacing is just wrong. The text description of the face is deconstructive to a buyers trust, e.g. it is not “purely geometric”, and there is no visible relationship between the face and most anything your average Joe would think of as “handwritten”.

and that would be my ass splattered all over the floor. so maybe this is an idea i should just take off the market for now.

"...and that would be my ass splattered all over the floor."

I don't mean to be disrespectful, but if I didn't know the difference between face and ass, I'd be in big trouble by now. This face is not a bad idea and it is nowhere near as hopeless as some of the faces hanging on to my computer for dear life.

Cheers!

and that would be my ass splattered all over the floor. so maybe this is an idea i should just take off the market for now.

Dave is right, this face is not hopeless. Just because it doesn’t sell is no reason to yank it entirely. Try dropping the price so that at least you’re competing with other designs of the style; if nothing else you could sell the fonts for $10 and the family at a steep discount and it might be a nice option for students who want to explore Dutch geometric type designs. Even that would be better than just burying it.

Also, you mentioned that you can think of plenty of uses, so why not put together some nice specimens, make a PDF, and give it a web site? Put it into a catalog of your work to hand out at conventions. Maybe you should go back and tweak the design first, but I don’t really think that you need to give up.

This face is not a bad idea and it is nowhere near as hopeless as some of the faces hanging on to my computer for dear life.

thanks, i appreciate that. but i also need to be realistic: the family is transitional between the super-geometric silliness i made a decade ago and the more refined grotesques i've grown into since around 2000 (and none of which are out to market yet).

i think a lot of what you said is worth considering. but i also think that if there's a decision to be made between re-tailoring the face or moving on to something more current, i should either:

1) fix the encoding issues, address usage and pricing and leave it (at least for now) so i can get some newer work out, or
2) simply keep it as a personal collection. i think i'm okay with either solution.

Ricardo Cordoba wrote: "It’s a lie. Under most circumstances, it’s considered unethical to lie."

There is absolutely nothing untrue about such a thing; it isn't like you're saying you HAVE done the typography for the law firm "Dewey, Cheatham and Howe," or even that it exists. All you'd be doing is giving potential clients and buyers a view of how their particular project might look on a billboard, in a brochure, whatever. Anything a potential client or buyer might assume on his or her own is his or her own problem. And like I said, if one were to inquire about something, what you've created solely was to provide visual possibilities. There's simply no need to say all of your visual samples are of fictional businesses or places unless someone asks. In the meantime, those who only need that extra little push into buying something and don't care about anything but how the typeface will work for them have in whatever strange way had their tastes confirmed. Again, this is speaking in nothing but general terms.

As for having an agenda . . . do I really? Wow, I better get started on that agenda right away. Now if you could only tell me what that agenda is (since you seem to know), I'll certainly give it my very best effort.

Patric earlier asked about the color red. In most design settings, the color red is a dominant, aggressive color and usually only works well when you use is to magnify the color itself and not anything it might be enhancing, be it words or anything else for that matter. In fact, when I first looked at your groups of flags on myfonts.com, I didn't even see the fonts for what they were, I just saw a boatload of red ... the color itself had consumed my initial attention and made the fonts secondary. Red - especially such a vibrant shade of it - is a dangerous color for design.

And in human terms, colors like blue, grey, and even most greens, when worn or used in homes, etc., are considered far more friendly and inviting than is red. Rarely will you ever see anyone employing lots of dominant reds on much of anything because almost immediately just the sight of it will take away much wanted attention from everything around it - whether it be clothes on your body or curtains in your home. This all goes back to what reactive human eye interprets first and how much attention the mind gives it. It's pretty much a universal mantra ... you know, kind of like "painting the town red." You never hear of anyone painting the town blue or some dark eggshell tone.

By the way, I actually don't think the typeface is that bad, either. As previously stated, I am not a fan of this category of typeface, but yours certainly has some appealing and unique characteristics. Although the lower-case "g" to me reminds me of the symbol for masculinity. I think. Is the cross under a circle representative of male or female? I always thought the circle with the arrow represented female but I wouldn't bet on it.

One of the great things about typography also is perhaps the very best thing about newspaper design: if you have a bad night, you almost always get another chance tomorrow. This is your typeface and you can make whatever improvements you want for the rest of your life. Maybe setting it aside for a few months and working on that Christmas script right now would be beneficial. It certainly seems scripts and similar handwriting/paint brush fonts right now are pretty strong sellers.

And just for the sake of my "agenda," has anyone ever heard of the brand name "Claudianni," which appears to have offices in New York, London, Boston, and Chicago?

Take a look below.

I've certainly never heard of it, nor have Yahoo or Google. It certainly seems Claudianni has chosen to use a certain typeface for its promo material though, doesn't it? I'd love to seem some of this company's literature, that's for sure.

i still think that needs a disclaimer or tagline of some sort to indicate that it's not real. either that or the brand needs to be really off the hook. otherwise it simply looks like trying to pull something on the audience.

Now if you could only tell me what that agenda is...

I thought I made that clear by quoting the part where you said, "Besides, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that some of the industry’s larger and more ff-famous vendors are similarly creative in various ways" [bold highlighting is mine], right before my comment about an agenda.

I supposed that saying "ff-famous" rather than "famous" meant that you were not-so-subtly referring to (or taking a stab at) FontShop, since their own fonts' names are usually preceded by an FF... Or did I read too much into it? Was it just a stutter? ;-D

I certainly agree ... to a point. This photo was taken from the fontfont.com website, promoting one of its typefaces. View here: http://www.fontshop.com/features/fontmag/003/003_ff/

Given this is a visual industry, any potential client should be provided a wide variety of visions depicting how attractive a typeface can be should they be considering this kind of advertising/promotion. It kind of traces back to the old chicken and egg debate, really.

In order for a potential client to know what kind of image would be projected of their business by using your typeface (generally speaking, not necessarily Commodity), presenting images such as the one above is the most effective way of doing so. Otherwise you're talking about a lot of people spending lots of money to use a typeface without having any idea of what it might look like on a billboard. Well, if I've never had one of my typefaces on a billboard, that client almost would be forced to rely on God's good humor because he or she certainly wouldn't have had any form of visual representation on which to rely . . . other than some spec sheets perhaps. And if they make specific inquiries about the billboard itself, then by all means a designer could and likely must explain it was just a visual example of the font's possibilities.

Keep in mind this is merely one of literally thousands of promotional techniques, and isn't something a designer should rely on exclusively - or even very often. I was just providing an example of various angles and approaches you could take to framing and presenting your work a bit differently.

Mr. Cordoba:

Though I've tried, I can't figure out how a subtle hint in writing makes the leap into being an "agenda." I suppose if I did have an "agenda" in writing "ff-famous," it would have been to suggest without actually suggesting, so to speak, that FontFont may employ this kind of display strategy. While perhaps not being the most forthcoming thing on Earth, I certainly didn't feel like some sort of devious schemer when I wrote it.

Beyond dropping a not-so-subtle hint, I cannot think of a single other thing you could believe I was trying to accomplish. Seriously, if I really was attempting to be cryptic in an effective way, it would have been a lousy attempt because you seemed to pick up on it right away. If I ever do have some sort of "agenda," I assure you I would never make it quite so easy to detect, much less even suspect. I'm starting to wonder if I need to take myself behind the woodshed and give myself a whippin' or something.

Curioustype,

the circle with arrow is the symbol for Mars and masculinity - I believe it represents the war god's shield and spear. The circle and cross is Venus, femininity. More here on NASA's site.

Thank you Kellie for the information, which made me remember the little trick I used to use to remember which was which - a trick I obviously forgot in my earlier post.

Patric, I like this face. I'd never seen it before. I can even see uses for it.
I'll keep it in mind.

Sharon

Some of the characters are too experimental for me, a, g, etc. It seems overpriced. I love geometric typefaces, but the forms here have been reduced to such basic shapes that it starts to take on an abstract quality, not a bad thing, but limits its possible applications.

Holy heck! $250? I hope that the fonts are shipped on a 500GB hard drive for that!

Nobody will buy it unless they know about it. Do what you have to do to get your font recognized, and people will purchase it. I would also suggest dropping the price down to $15, or so, considering it's a display face more than a legit typeface. Display faces are less useful than typefaces intended for legibility in blocks of copy.

+
Ryan Ford

The 'My Fonts' explanation states:
"Commodity’s italics are surprising for geometric faces, heavily inspired by handwritten forms"

I would say the opposite. The italic is more like an oblique, and apart from the slanted verticals, I see no heavy handwritten inspiration.

(btw, kudos to Patrick for initiating this interesting post, very brave)

The italic is actually an oblique

wrong. if it was an oblique i would have just slanted the forms. formation of a, f, g, h, j, m, n, r, s, u, y are very much taken from handwritten cursive motions.

Fair point Patrick, though my handwriting is more organic and flowing ; )

Perhaps I am taking the claim too literally, to me a font like Frutiger Next Italic is "heavily" inspired by handwritten forms.

Patrick said that Commodity had originally been released by thirstype. I see that this company still exists, so wonder why they don't still carry the font. I read somewhere that Lucas De Grote pulled his Thesis fonts out of the FontShop collection and released them himself. Is it the same story here?

i think Commodity is a simple font, too simple to justify the price, mostly compared to other fonts in the same site.

for the untrained eye, it might look similar to some of these fonts
http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=301

for the trained eye, it is rather simple, and at prices that compete with, for example:
http://www.emigre.com/EF.php?fid=84 or
http://www.emigre.com/EF.php?fid=107

i obviously will buy Cholla or Modula. after all, they're Emigre fonts, and you can see the sweat in each of their so many details. it just makes me happy by merely looking at them.

it seems to me (i repeat that: it "seems" to me) that half a day and FontCreator will allow me to reproduce it. seems like a series of boxes with a median line, some slants and a differently-looking quirky k (personally i find the k disturbing as it does not keep any proportion). Commodity does not surprise me, does not excite me. and by its selling history, it might not be exciting others as well.

Revenant has personality, reminds me of Eurostile, but rather bolder, more streamlined, you can almost see a defined aggressive character in it. Fast Girls has it with its slashed computer-savvy roundness (a rounded sister to that old Chicago font for the first macs, which was a lovely mistake of a font), Smile has it with its geometrically-disturbed guts brings memories of Buro Destruct typeness. Commodity lacks that character your other fonts have.

this is not a harsh critic, it is an opinion. you have very good intense fonts. kudos and keep it going.

--
argonaut | sans faux pas

honestly mate it is too expensive and not very well dranw. That is wh¥ noone will pay for it!! so just drop the price or drop the whining abd you;ll be right.

-----------------------
Chopper Reid says "Harden the **** up".

I see that this company still exists, so wonder why they don’t still carry the font.

there is no intrigue at work. chester and i both helped build thirstype during our tenure at thirst. i left the company in '99. chester bought the assets for thirstype, then decided to roll it into the village umbrella brand. i asked chester to pull all my work from the brand last year as village's focus was changing to the point that my own work no longer fit his focus very well. we didn't complete that transition until very recently.

Thanks for your answer Patrick. It seems like there has been a movement away from the big impersonal foundries towards small, one-person companies. This seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the rise of online font shops, especially MyFonts. I wonder if anyone ever thought of doing a shop like MyFonts, but without all of the amateur garbage.

Vllg?

yes, vllg. i'm not sure if that's the actual name of ches' company or simply the URL.

I have to admit the most I would say is that it is a geometric font inspired in part by handwritten forms. But so what? Patrick can write whatever he likes - and should. Patrick, what kind of type stuff are you doing now? I am curious to see it if you are willing. I went through the PDF at 'house of pretty'.

this is what i meant by heavily inspired by handwritten forms:

same basic flow of motion. (squarer, obviously.)

eben, that PDF's out of date as all hell and was never very good to begin with. we've been too busy to really get a portfolio together. cobbler's new shoes, etc. that's actually my holiday project.

this is my current face. been in progress off-and-on for a few years.

working on two lighter weights that this one at the moment.

also this sketch, which has no name.

Cool! Thanks.