A friend asked me if I knew where to find ITC Grouch, but I found out that that font is not available for lisencing due to some dispute, between Bitstream and Monotype, I believe. But after some months that Herb Lubalin design just creeped back into my head, so I had to do my take on it.
What do you think? It's heavier than Grouch, and proportions differ as well from the original. But I'm pretty happy with the counter forms.
Grumpy-sample.pdf
I do think there's demand for this type of font.
Letters that are working especially well to my eye include /S/A/q/e/v/
I'd consider raising /G/'s crossbar, or dropping/enlarging the top serif, to close the aperture.
Lower counter of /a/ looks small and kind of sad.
/x/ and /z/ are too wide.
/g/ is narrow and light (not an easy puzzle to solve at this weight, of course). I'm not usually a fan of that "Tomi g" but it fits the style perfectly in this case, if you can get the weight and width to work.
That big slant of the head serifs, when it appears at the midline, makes letters like /u/m/p/r/ look kind of stepped-on. Perhaps it's just a matter of raising those stems further into the overshoot zone.
Did you try putting the bilateral serif on the first stem of /m/ instead of the middle one? The one-way serifs on /h/ and /n/ work well.
/s/ may be light.
Should /R/'s leg be a little thicker?
Should the crossbars of /f/ and /t/ be thickened a bit?
Maybe add some weight to the serif of the middle arm of /E/ and /F/.
/U/ looks narrow. /Y/ looks a bit high-waisted. /N/'s diagonal needs more weight.
I'm not sold on the /Q/'s tail.
I wonder if at some point you'd want to chamfer those acute angles.
Keep up the good work!
Just my 2 cents:
Since it is for display use only you could push the contrast to the extreme. More extreme than in ITC Grouch. Hairline extreme. That would make a great stylish headline face for magazines.
Thanks for the comments. I've only just finished the basic character set, so there is still loads to tweak an re-draw. Craig, you really have a good eye for this. I'll work through your comments. And Jörg; that is indeed something to think about. In fact, I think I'll go with that.
Related to the idea of a higher-contrast Grouch (which, by the way, I think is a good idea):
http://www.typophile.com/node/73626
Riccardo; your link made me realize that I've seen those samples, and I think they were a part of this Grouch-thingy to seep into my head. Thanks for that. I think I'll do two variants: Display and Text, and perhaps a lighter variants as well…
I think optical sizes is a great idea for a typeface like this.
I draw two versions of the ampersand:
And I also finished the basic character set:
http://typophile.com/node/77423
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