U, and N is sort of hard to decode. Apart from that (I'm not even sure if it's a drawback) this is totally amazing!

Thank you, frode frank.

Whoa! Another fantastic effort!
Decorative N might be mistaken for H. I think the inner twirl on decorative W needs the stress the other way.
I'd do the RO and OS as ligatures as those tails on R and S are designed around the O, and won't work so well next to other glyphs.
I'm really liking this! KUTGW! ;)

It's beautiful if pretty hard to read. Is it supposed to be "arhaic" or "archaic"?

I think I'd tweak a few elements for readability (sorry I'm a usability guy :-) ) -- e.g. the M has structural elements that are disguised as decoration which make it hard to parse. The A containing both a lowercase and uppercase A is very playful ... I wonder if this might not be something that one could tease out into an entire font (perhaps having almost identical upper and lowercase elements which simply de-emphasize some elements in a given glyph).

It reminds me of the vyaz script.

maybe you could make the decorative more extreme? the difference between noraml and decorative is a bit small.

and how about a stripped-down version, with the extreme letterforms in an "undecorated" version?

alex

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www.alexanderfjelldal.net

I wonder if this might not be something that one could tease out into an entire font

That's exactly what I started to sketch when I first saw this thread. Thanks Florinf for sharing these images and your work, which looks great!

Did you guys see the other ones Florin has done?
Arhaic Geo
Arhaic Cali

To me it's funny how the letters look more readable when all put together into words than in the alphabet. I'm really loving this ;)

More about Vyaz font with some *awesome* examples of people's names :)

Hello all,

First of all thank you very much for all your comments. Great input for me.

@Bendy, I will try to adjust the letters (N and W), ligatures would be great indeed, thank you for mentioning the other fonts I am working on.

@podperson, I know it's hard to read but it's just a decorative font meant for titles and just a couple of words. The name "arhaic" is the Romanian equivalent to the English word "archaic". I thought I write Romanian words because it's based on old Romanian letters and it will probably used mainly for Romanian. I will adjust the M. I was also stroke by the lowercase a there, but didn't thought about creating a font using that solution. This is a great idea, thank you. I hope to see other font using it (@eliason), here on Typophile.

@riccard0, yes you are right, it resembles Vyaz font and that's because they both share the same origin. There was a time when religious books in Romania were written using Slavonic language and some time later only the Cyrillic letters were used. Romanian language is a latin one and uses latin letters so there was only a period in time that the Romanian Orthodox Church used it. I was thinking of reviving them although they are hard to use. Only traditional, religious Romanian texts would be appropriate, but anyway I thought they should be brought to present day and computer use. So, yes it's a sort of a "nephew" of Vyaz. :)

@alexfjeldall, more extreme decorative would be fun so I think I will do it. For now, the letters presented here are some of the variants I did and you can see them all on my blog (text is in Romanian but images speak for themselves) LInk:
http://florinf.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/arhaic-romanesc-ornamental/
Undecorated would also be nice to do, so I think there would be a large family for this one.

Thank you all.

Florin

The A is at once beautiful, witty, and smart. Very nice work on the whole!

Thank you microspective.

This one could be a really interesting type if you think of the wide range of combinations of ligatures possible.
1.The book says at its very beginning: VIATA and that shows the ligature v_i
I would re-design V and W because for example they would not work by A. The ball terminal of them are actually from the I (of viata).

2. Try to compense it optically: The R and K of Simple variable, need to have a bit longer tail. Remember the -curve rule- of designing a type. (Circles always need to be bigger than squares to look the same size). Also look at the bottom of the S, it looks smaller than the T because of that. The serif of T is straight, the base of S curved. So, S must break the baseline a little bit.

It is awesome when a type gives this possibilitie of playing with lots of alternate forms.
Do not surrender , I like your project. Test how it writes, and upload new samples!

Lián Types

The circles on all the swirls (g, h, j, k) are all different sizes, it would look better if they were all the same size. In all retrospect it is a beautiful font!

Absolutely incredible work here. I would love to have this as a font. If you will, let me know when it's available for purchase.