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3rd time is a charm.

milk.swf milk.swf (11 k)

Kyle,

Good show. There's a shortage of decent tag fonts.

I would leave the size inconsistencies
as they are. If the user is required to resize
letters at random they will end up with pen
strokes that are out of proportion (the enlarged
glyphs having thicker strokes than they should).

Zooming in on the flash file I noticed you're
generally free of vectorization quirks*. That's a
tough point to reach. How big do you draw
before scanning?

Great translation job overall. I can see this
working at small sizes and as a huge display
face. It's wild, yet legible. Although I would
consider reining in the 't' a bit - if only so
it doesn't obscure the legibility of adjacent
glyphs.

This is also an excellent candidate for
alternates. Have a go at redrawing the
alphabet as you would normally (allowing
for subtle variations in each glyph) and see
if you can build a set of alts.


Other tagger faces to check out:

- Gary Munch's fairly white-boy Urban Scrawl
- Thomas Marecki's Tag Team is more your style


Stephen


* The lowercase 's' and 'q' didn't vectorize so
well. See if you can smooth those out.

I like what I see... you should also do some tagger-style ornaments like finial arrows (Tag Team seems to have one). Also, it might be a good opportunity for ligatures. I wish I could write like that.

Fun.

If you're ambitious, you could achieve a greater
level of randomness by creating an alternate set.
By introducing other variations you wouldn't run
into the stroke weight problem Stephen mentions.

This would add to the 'randomness' by making it
possible to write 'street' with two different Es.

(This is my beef with distressed faces. They
feel canned and phony when two of the same
characters are identical.)

first of all, it would be nice to see a sample of how you
might set a headline (or text if you like) with these
existing charcters. a line-up of the alphabet gives us a
good chance to look at induvidual glyphs, but very little
understanding of how it might look in context.

secondly, with the idea of setting the characters at a
large display size, the vectorization oddities that
Steven mentions become more problematic. you might
think of producing a variation of the family in which the
*oddities* of the marker (eg, bleed and soft corners)
are featured. this would, of course, take an enormous
amount of time (kind of an ironic feature of digitizing
this type of font), but I think you have a design with a
lot of potential -- it may warrant that sort of
investment if you're going to make use of it.

I've definitely thought about the idea of adding alternate characters to get more mileage out of the face...I think I'll try to do 5 different variations for every character.

I thought I had seen most of the other graf faces out there, but I'd never seen Tag Team...very cool.

Anyway, here's a typeset sample...other than a little kerning, this is what it looks like when it's typed.

Thanks for the feedback!

milk_test.swf milk_test.swf (4 k)