it makes me think of cross-stitch! now, I haven't really
examined your characters very thoroughly, so this first
comment may be the only one worth listening to, but...

as for the lc, set some text with the uc and lc so we can
get an idea of how the two work together. in this
context, I can't say I like the look of the lower case, but
the overall structure seems to flow fairly well. for some
reason, however, the lc does feel more open. I think it
has to do with the fact that they are so round
compared to the oblong shapes of the uc.

OK, here's another view.



It seems very clunky to me.

One idea I had was to reduce the prominence of the angles on the lower case... I tried it with the upper case but at smaller point sizes the 45 degree angles are hard to distinguish from curves unless they are as blatant as in these examples.

For starters, I would increase the letterspacing and decrease the word spacing. This will help it to look less clunky, and help you to evaluate the individual glyph designs.

David

John - this face has nice potential...

UC J, i'd bring down
UC V seems narrow
lc e needs some breathing room
lc t, i'd try some alternates
lc m and w, perhaps widen

Also, the glyphs with a crossbar...they might look better with a 'centered' crossbar.

Re: Dave's comments...Because you're in illustrator, setting up some guide lines and snapping to them will give you a consistent baseline. Or use a grid. Or when you are done, use the Align tool.

In Fontographer, manually tighten your space bar spacing. It defaults at '1000' which is excessive.

good lookin' stuff.

bj

Thanks BJ! Great help. Here's a revised font. Note that I still don't have numerals or punctuation. However, I did throw it into fontographer, but haven't had time to kern it properly.

There's some weird optical stuff going on -- the C seems larger than it really is, and some of the horizontal strokes (top part of the S, bottom part of the E) seem really skinny.

Huh, the all-caps I think is actually pretty nice!

hhp

John - I would add that if/when you take this out of the realm of 'personal font' and attempt to make it commercial, it'd be wise to investigate others that are of the same ilk so that yours is not considered derivative. Check out Gridnik and some monoline Identikal fonts (T26) and maybe some others.

bj

Here's a new version of the lower case... better or worse?



(Sorry about the spacing)

Here's a better specimen:

I read the lowercase "a" as a "q". Consider moving the descending part to the right maybe?

Otherwise I think it looks better.