in progress

I'm weighing whether to finish this font (see the last post for more about how it came to be). It's interesting in a freak show kind of way, and I'm interested to hear what people think of it. In the mean time, here is a public beta. It's rough, with only rudimentary spacing and kerning. Only the upper and lower case characters are supported here. As usual you can use it, but don't publish the font files or try to sell it.

This is an alphabet I did for the "Typographic Lovechild" battle at Typophile. The challenge was to mix Garamond and Zebrawood.

This setting shows an alternate 'a'.

I've been doing a lot of knobby wobbly types lately. Here is a push in the other direction with a sketch of a more rational geometric. I'm not convinced that it needs the curvy 'l'.

There is no comparison between the beauty of printed type and the shallow simulacra of type displayed on a low resolution screen. That being said, more and more printed genres are evaporating as we read more and more on screen.

We've seen it with annual reports. Printed newspapers are gasping for air. The paperback industry is looking over the edge of a precipitous drop. Let's face it: the future of moveable type is on screen.

Someday everywhere we look we will see beautiful high resolution screens with eye popping color and detail. Everything we look at will be covered with moving images. The grocery store shelves will look like Times Square. We will do a good portion of our reading on handheld devices with amazing type rendering capabilities.

In the meantime, however, back in 96 dpi land we see very little type diversity in our compulsive on-screen reading (slashdot.org how I hate you. I've given you the best years of my life). Apple struck a blow with Safari 3.1 that allows CSS sheets to reference TrueType fonts (Yay! Go Apple!). The font industry is screaming because someone might use their fonts illegally on the web. What they don't realize is that right now no one is using their fonts on the web, illegally or not. That's all about to change. Hopefully now we'll see more types designed for screen use. Hopefully we'll see more creativity and expressiveness in screen typography. We'll certainly have to generate some new EULAs for our fonts.

With that long prologue, here are some sketches of a new type I'm designing for on screen reading:

I was playing with my beta serif tonight, pushing the outlines around, and I came up with this slabby goodness. It's just like a nice tough slab of the cheapest sirloin you can buy, complete with a chalky baked potato and lots of ranch on a pile of iceberg lettuce.

I just sketched up a super rough medium weight as well. It feels much more versatile than the bold, though it still works for copy about steak.

Grant Avenue is inspired by the inscriptional lettering from the beginning of the last century in downtown San Francisco. I've just taken a first pass at a bold weight.