Typophile

July Typeface - looking for good critique

Lysyszyn

Hey there!
Well, I'm new here so maybe I should introduce myself.
My name's Filip Łysyszyn and I'm young (typo)graphic designer wanna-be from Warsaw, Poland. I'm not a design/art student (I study english philology).
I've recently started working on a new typeface that I hope to be my first "serious" one. However, I'm still very unexperienced and I really would appreciate professionals help (that means you, guys).

So, let's get it on:
The typeface name is July, probably because I started it in July.
It's meant to be a roman type with rather big aperture, small contrast and strong but short sherifs.
These weird acutes you see are a polish diacritics "kreska". These strange accents in "a" and "e" are again polish diacritics called "ogonek". The "l" with a diagonal line in the middle is a polish letter "ł" (lslash).
I haven't put it in a font file yet, because some glyphs need corrections - that's why I can't show it in a paragraph here.

Work In Progress Specimen:
http://lysyszyn.pl/projects/specimen01.png
http://lysyszyn.pl/projects/specimen02.png - lowercase
http://lysyszyn.pl/projects/specimen03.png - uppercase
http://lysyszyn.pl/projects/specimen04.png - small caps
http://lysyszyn.pl/projects/specimen05.png - ligatures

PDF PREVIEW
http://lysyszyn.pl/projects/preview.pdf

Again, I would appreciate any help and critique!
Your's sincerely,
Filip Łysyszyn

PS. If I violated any rule of etiquete around here, please forgive and let me know.

Satya Rajpurohit

Hi Filip,

Your typeface has a nice feeling I think. Congratulations!
It's hard to look at the details in these images - you should rather upload some pdf samples. Don't use colors or any effects in the samples, keep them simple, black and white.

Good luck!

Lysyszyn

What you want is what you get!

http://lysyszyn.pl/projects/preview.pdf

And thank you for your comment!

Craig Eliason

Nice work. This has appealing character, and I especially like the ligatures.

You should definitely move it to a font design program so you can evaluate it in more settings. Once you do that, here are some questions I would ask:
- Is the top of 'c', 'q' too light? 'C'?
- Are the lumps of 'm' too pointy? 'n'?
- Do the 'f's in the 'ff' ligature match well?
- Is the transition from thick to thin in 'S'/'s' too abrupt?
- Is 'N' too narrow? 'M'?
- Is 'J' off balance?
- Is the space under 'Q's tail within the bowl serving well at target sizes?
- Are some of the small caps too dark (for example 'M')?
- Should the right foot serifs of 'f' and 'r' be extended to help balance the letters?

Hope that helps.

Lysyszyn

Thank you so much for so many advices! These are extremally helpful, I really needed that.

- Filip Łysyszyn

mgking

I like what I see, but would like to see some sample text to see how well it would read.
mgk

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