08.28.17 | Proposition 1 - Font Family

There are a few things I've started working on that I think would be pretty easy to further myself in for the sake of this course. Depending on how linear you want everything to be, I can establish some hard guidelines and work on one thing at a time, or if I end up multitasking I can still set up some deadlines for basic milestones.

Font Family


Around July or August, I started working on a font (family) I've been calling Sarabande because of the emphasis on 3:4 ratios in the proportions. I did "finish" a preliminary version consisting of the characters above, but that was mainly a test run. Right now I'm using Fontself for it, which is a relatively cheap extension for both Photoshop and Illustrator that allows you to convert graphics into characters. I'm only using the Illustrator variant.

As-is, it can export actual fonts (or even produce families for things like bold, oblique, condensed variants, etc.), with the main limitation being that functionality doesn't exist for kerning pairs. There's no way I can go through and reliably format kerning values for each and every combination of characters, so I'm holding off on setting the custom kerning built-in to the font itself.


I've started working on a second iteration of the font, although this time I'm working on each of the weights on a per-character basis, rather than trying to do every character and then doing additional weights after-the-fact. There are a few characters I've worked on already:


From a philosophical standpoint, the font is meant to be a more modern-feeling wedding between the styles of Lato and ITC Conduit, while also incorporating some of the sharpness and angularity in the forms from older fonts like Star. I'm not really looking to make money off of it at the moment, but having a font with a few different widths and weights that I made myself would be nice, especially for mostly digitally-based UI / UX designs, as opposed shelling out hundreds of dollars for something like Proxima Nova.

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