I'm unsure if "no descenders" provides increased clarity. For example, lowercase q is easy to recognize because your eyes are already drawn to it being one of few characters that descend. In the case of this font, you have a small uppercase Q as the lowercase q. This feels like it accomplishes the opposite of this stated benefit.
> I'm unsure if "no descenders" provides increased clarity.
Of course not: if it did we would be doing it that way everywhere. Typeface design has thousands of years of history, there's only a few major variations in latin types and we've tried them all. Descenders exist for a reason.
This type is pretty cool for what it is meant for, the retro aesthetics. Old school digital displays (like alarm clocks) don't have descenders so it fits pretty well.
Nowhere does it promise to increase clarity. In one place it says "modern clarity", which is in my opinion and many cases worse than non-modern clarity.
Yep, I agree. Your eyes need these clues to help you read at speed. When every character looks similar, you have to slow down to look at individual characters, rather than just glancing at a whole word.
Letter spacing is not great for that 'i' indeed. Monospace fonts use a very wide serif at the bottom, or an extended arm to make the i appear equally-spaced, which this typeface seems to have ignored.
You’ve picked a difficult way to make your first typeface. A monoline design with a strict vector grid doesn’t leave a lot of room for the kind of optical adjustments needed for balanced and readable letter shapes. But I think even if you want to be strict about those restrictions there is a lot of room for improvement in consistency and composition of each shape.
I started to write actionable suggestions about individual letters but realized it’s probably better to drop this link, which starts at how to draw an ”A” and continues with every letter of the alphabet. https://ohnotype.co/blog/ohno-type-school-a
It's perfect for my use case, which is making individual square letters to print. PITA to ensure that the square are uniform when the letters are not uniform in size.
Aesthetically, great. But i can't help but find it harder to read this font. Probably cool for things such as a poster or album art, but not something i'd enjoy using in my code editor.
Please add a github release with the assets (ttf, otf, etc.). I'm developing an open-source font repository+downloader and it will make it easier to write an install script for it.
Great job! I've tried many times to design a font and failed.
That said, here's some: I'd love to see multiple weights. Not just bold, the new fonts can have multiple weights. Italic could help also but with the letters staying in the box. Also, the letters are too much to the left to my liking. Large amount of space between letters makes it even more visible.
Cool concept.
I like the lowercase q a lot.
The misaligned dot (tittle) on the lowercase i and j bugs me.
It feels off to have it at different heights.
I'd try making the i taller to match the j.
No descenders - fine. But I find the lowercase L, and to a lesser extent the lowercase F, very unpleasant looking. Something to do with the overly intrusive and segmented curve.
The squished descenders are surprisingly not horrible. (They are horrible in some actual 80s fonts from 8-bit devices.) But I don't like the giant intrusive 'l' that looks like a ladle, it's got too much character.
Flashbacks to the Okidata Microline 80 dot matrix printer I used in high school (early 1980s) - it had a 7-wire print head, so no descenders and lower case "g" was particularly bad (basically to get the detail in 7 lines it had a squashed shape and it was moved up in the box, looking more like a weird "9".) My teachers were... tolerant but mildly annoyed, mostly because they knew just how bad my handwriting was :-)
It reminds me of the rather strange story of the Mormon "Deseret Alphabet" which was designed to not have descenders, in order to reduce uneven wear on the pieces of type.
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Of course not: if it did we would be doing it that way everywhere. Typeface design has thousands of years of history, there's only a few major variations in latin types and we've tried them all. Descenders exist for a reason.
This type is pretty cool for what it is meant for, the retro aesthetics. Old school digital displays (like alarm clocks) don't have descenders so it fits pretty well.
Yeah but I wouldn't just assume it's because they are the optimal solution. Look at architectural handwriting, very clear, no descenders.
Deleted Comment
I started to write actionable suggestions about individual letters but realized it’s probably better to drop this link, which starts at how to draw an ”A” and continues with every letter of the alphabet. https://ohnotype.co/blog/ohno-type-school-a
That said, here's some: I'd love to see multiple weights. Not just bold, the new fonts can have multiple weights. Italic could help also but with the letters staying in the box. Also, the letters are too much to the left to my liking. Large amount of space between letters makes it even more visible.
But that's for using it as my daily driver, which doesn't seem to be the actual motivation.
Do more fonts. Do more things. I thank you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet