i want to make my Seaside typeface as pan-european, so i will add monotonic greek as well as my native european cyrillic.
i remember how big help which i had got about Oksana Greek here on typophile (thank you again!) and i post some greek letters here again.
what do you think about it?
thank you!
>>>How Greek is it?
How Greek do you want it to be?
There are, broadly speaking, two schools of thought:
(1) That the Greek characters should reflect the traditional Greek ductus (whatever that is) and that your Greek glyphs will generally be more lively and cursive than the Latin.
(2) That there are some designers who use Greek who want to have a more 'Westernised' look to their Greek glyphset (so there is nothing to distinguish between, for example a latin /v/ and a Greek /nu/).
People (dare I say, purists) seem to be far more critical of (2) than (1), by the way.
Your Greek glyphs will sit somewhere on that spectrum between (1) and (2) and it is entirely up to you where on that spectrum it sits.
As far as individual glyphs are concerned, and without wanting to be critical, I would say you have tried to do the Greek as quickly as possible, making your solutions to individual glyphs the ones that are easiest to execute from a Latin starting point. These may not make the best Greek glyphs for the font. At the end of the piece, there is no substitute for studying a wealth of Greek fonts and deciding which shapes are the ones that you think comfortably suit Seaside, rather than the ones that can be drawn most easily from existing Latin, even though that may mean more work.
N
thank you, Nick
it is exactly the question. as far as i can see, some of greek type-designers chooses 'western' look for their new typefaces, like http://parachute.gr or http://fonts.gr do. so i hope i can choose this way if 'traditional' way is not so clear for me.
as native cyrillic reader i know examples of cyrillic from latin people who wanted go deep into 'tradition' and gave so much coleur locale so such cyrillic became more foreigner that 'latinized' one.
Just as a quick note: a nifty collection of useful links Preparation for Greek typeface design popped out recently. It says it's not exhaustive by any measure, but digging through will, I think, occupy you for a while.
It's not just a matter of style, Latinization can harm readability by
riding roughshod over a writing system's natural use of the Cartesian
space. For example Armenian needs a smaller "x-height" than Latin.
hhp
Captured from web.archive.org on 14 Apr 2015. view this capture