John September 7th, 2008
I used the Proctor Zeus font yesterday to make some signs at work. In so doing I found that at larger sizes some of the characters show small angles where I’d meant for them to have nothing but curves.
Now I’m going through the fonts glyph by glyph, finessing the letters and digits.
It’s dull work, though valuable, so I’ve also started a second entirely different font that I’ve had in mind for awhile.
John September 2nd, 2008
Font is done, coyly described as “in the style of a popular children’s book author” or somesuch.
It took about 60 hours total, though most of that was due to inefficiency: these were the first four fonts I’d made and so I was unfamiliar with both the process and the software. Also, though it’s a decorative font, I decided to go ahead and make the regular font, “italics,” “bold,” and “bold italics.” (The scare quotes are on those because the other fonts are really just different drawings of the same characters: a hack to allow an easy way to swap one B for another that’s slightly different, etc.)
They’re Unicode fonts, but they don’t have the full 1674 glyphs: I thought I’d have to know both Yiddish and Hebrew to stylize those characters without risking morphing them into something they’re not, so I just left them alone. I also didn’t add the Romanian characters, but if there should ever be a need for them I’d be willing to go back and add them.
The fonts all validate, for whatever that’s worth: no off-curve extreme coordinates, no contours with incorrect direction, no intersecting coordinates.
They look very good in Photoshop, not so good in MS Word. But they print from Word with much finer detail than they’re shown with on screen.
The Proctor Zeus fonts are available here.
update: I had a redirect in the .htaccess file wrong earlier; it’s fixed now and font downloads work as they should.
John August 29th, 2008
Work continues on the font. At this point I’ve spent about 40 hours on it over the last few weeks, from inking to scanning to cleaning up the letters, to importing the glyphs to removing extraneous points and curves to validating and testing.
I’m done with the regular and italics, halfway through the bold, not yet started on the bold italics, and thoroughly tired of the work.