Typophile

Marathon 05

Tomi from Suomi

I just had a talk with an old friend, and remembered I once made a font in just three hours and four minutes. It was for AtypI 05. I'd promised to the House guys that (after they almost managed their Font Sprint in Vancouver) that I'd try to make a full character Western character set in under five hours. I used an old RoboFog for character design and kerning pairs, and FontLab for OT features. I'd made a file ready with guides, so I didn't start absolutelyfrom scratch.
This took me 3 hours and 4 minutes from start to PDF sample:


I think it's ugly as f**k, but it works as a font. What do you think?

AttachmentSize
Marathon Sample.indd_.pdf21.98 KB
Hrant H Papazian

Do you mean marathon or do you mean sprint? :-)

The bad news is that this sort of exercise might cheapen the craft. The good news is it makes you look good in terms of producing something not horrible in an extremely short time, illustrating the role of talent and skill to newbies who make an attempt and fail at making something decent even though they spend much more time (and often even start from somebody else's outlines).

And the "a" is actually quite nice. :-)

hhp

Jason Pagura

The application of the words "sprint" and "marathon" to non-running activities has always confused me. I'll be attending a life-drawing marathon tomorrow that goes for about 6 hours, and in a couple weeks a documentation sprint that takes place over 6 days, to use the names by which their respective organizers call them. I suppose they're both tests of speed and endurance, but not in any other way similar to any sort of athletic competition.

But anyway, that's a pretty admirable font you made there, all things considered. I'm capable of banging out as many glyphs in a similar amount of time, but they usually don't look that good when I do.

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