OUGD 503 - Collaborative: Typeface

Now that we had the grid and Harrison had tested to make sure it would work, we began drawing all of the letterforms by hand. Below are all of the sheets that contain all of our experiments and failed drawings, as well as many of the final letters:

Now that we had all of the uppercase and lowercase pretty much finalised, as well as having many other glyphs, it was my job to digitalise all of them. All I had to do was use the grid as a guideline and fill in sections using the pen tool and pathfinder. I created a small set of components that should make up all of the letterforms:

For some of the letters extra bits were needed, such as these:

As you can see below, the letters fit perfectly into the grid:

Here is the final uppercase, along with all of the letterforms that were tried and decided against:

Failed letterforms:

I then arranged the letters into groups to see which letters were similar in structure to others:

I then added all of the accents onto each letter that required one, using these accents:

As a set, they looked like this:

After uppercase we made lowercase, as well as the accents. Here are all of the failed attempts at letterforms, often used within a word in order to see how the specific letter worked alongside other letters:

Failed letters:

The final accents, as a set:

Punctuation:

I also made ligatures, including putting each one into a word to see how it worked in context. These are the failed attempts:

And here are the final ones, used in words:

We has already struggled with the uppercase M, W, N and V and so I made a lot of variations until we were happy with one:

The ones that we were unsure of were put into a word and we could then choose the ones that we liked most:

Here are our finals:

Here are the numbers, along with all failed attempts:

Failed attempts:

In order to decide how high up some glyphs would sit in comparison to the others we made some sums. Although it is only a small difference, here we were checking how high up the 'x' and the '=' should be:

Here are some other glyphs that were made in order to add to the typeface and make it more usable and complete:

Here are the failed attempts:

If we were unsure, we would just put all of the examples we have into context and pick a winner from that:

And that completed our typeface. Despite it being a bad way to create various weights, we decided to try adding a stroke to the typeface to create different weights. This is how our three weights would be. Light, Regular and Bold, including an outline version for each weight:

I also worked with giving the typeface a point size, so that we could see how well it worked in smaller and larger sizes. This will also help us when we put it into the type specimen, as we can showcase how it works at various sizes.

From the point sizes I made this pattern. Each block relates to the size of the text at the above sizes (48, 60, 72, 100, 200, 400). I thought it looked really interesting and could maybe be used at a later stage.

This is the uppercase, lowercase and numbers in each weight to show how it works:

I then gathered all of the typeface together and aligned it into a grid, splitting the letterforms into groups.

I then wanted to place the letters into a grid to show how each would fit and where it would be placed in comparison to the baseline, x-height and cap height. As you can see below, this was done with rectangles and dotted lines:

This is the whole typeface arranged into the grid:

The next job is trying to put it into Fontographer. This is something that Harrison will be attempting whilst I watch and try to help as best I can.