my first font - named 'happy pebble' - the lower case

willem visser17 Dec 2010

Over the past couple of years I've become really interested in fonts. I'm a maths teacher by day and amateur designer and now amateur typographer by night (and by weekend and school holiday). I have designed a font before, but I made every rookie mistake possible.

So then I bought this very helpful book titled 'Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces' by Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals which I am thoroughly enjoying and from which I am learning a lot. I also learn a lot from typophile.com and from just observing the world around me - that's one thing I love about type, it's everywhere.

My first font is called 'happy pebble'. The look is based on this idea I got for the lower case 'a'. In my mind it looked a bit like a sculpted pebble you might find on the beach. I've only yet completed the lower case characters and the project still hasn't left Illustrator.

I've followed an evolutionary process so that whoever is helping me out can see where I was going and a bit of what I was thinking. Each letter's version that I liked the most and felt the most fitting is in a bluish purple with the unchosen ones in black:

Here are also some words I created in Illustrator to get a feel of the letters working together (and to test out some variations of a specific character):

I am very new at this but I find it very exciting. I still have much to learn, so please let me know what you think (my friends and family thinks its great, but they are biased).

Attachment	Size
happy pebble-01.png	33.19 KB
happy pebble-02.png	29.4 KB
happy pebble-03.png	29.61 KB

eliason17 Dec 2010#

A pleasing start.
You may find uppercase forms more difficult to fit into the scheme--unless you plan to make them all larger lowercase forms, like your A.
I don't think it makes much sense to make the dot of /i/j/ into that drop shape.

Tomi from Suomi17 Dec 2010#

Try to be more rigid, and give no room for any deviation. Your O works well with Odam.

Sorry; I can see your goal with those modular forms, and I like the overall design, but you just can not build every glyph with your modules. (Well, you can, but I'm not telling you how).

riccard018 Dec 2010#

Good work. Once you established "a" as your building brick, I think you should abandon it as a glyph… or at least try a mirrored one (with a bottom right angle).