Bucky

iconoclast_a9 Nov 2004

I started this font a long time ago with some inspiration from the idea of the OCR fonts being able to be read by machines as well as humans. This idea placed several constraints on the design, such as being monospaced, and very simple.

With time, I realized it was too constraining and that the font wanted to go somewhere else, so it was abandoned like so many other projects. Then, at the very beginning of this year I stumbled upon the Typophile forum, and became interested in finishing the font.

This is what I have so far. It's changed from the original in having a larger x-height, but the imposition still remains that there be no curved lines and that the characters be as different from each other as possible. I'm having trouble deciding the shape of some characters, such as the uppercase Q. Start the critique!

bucky.pdf (58.2 k)

iconoclast_a17 Nov 2004#

Any comments? Any?

dart21 Nov 2004#

I think your e and z - and one of your a's too, now that I look closer - are a bit close for the
as-different-as-possible constraint. I think one of the original goals of the OCR-A and OCR-B fonts
(as well as a few others, such as most license plates) is that you can't subtract small parts from one
character to get another, since scratched up, or badly photocopied, text may confuse the computer. I think that should be part of this design.

For that matter, I notice that you have mulitple versions of some of the lower case letters: a, o, g,...
probably more if I went over it very carefully. Why the duplication? (Not a critique, that. Just curious.)

iconoclast_a21 Nov 2004#

You're right about them being kind of similar. But even though the OCR fonts were in a way the inital inspiration, Bucky is not intended to be like that, I basically just took the idea of imposing some limits on the way things could be, so as to achieve a certain unity.

How do you think they could be made less similar without breaking their identity?

In regard to the different versions, well they're alternatives between which I can't seem to decide what's best. You can see all the alternatives in the PDF above.

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 27 Apr 2015. original URL