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by webmaven 3407 days ago
dberlow, I am finding this really interesting (as well as your essay[0] on the work-in-progress that is Amstelvar[1]).

What tools are you using for the design process? Anything like Metapolator[2]?

Personally, I feel that the critiques here concerning "ugliness" are overblown, as will most who recall the work of designers such as David Carson[3] and publications like Emigre[4]. It actually isn't that hard to find combinations that "work" as a display typeface, although I would probably want to tweak them manually a bit before use.

BTW, if David Jonathan Ross and Alexandre Saumier Demers are taking feature requests for the Decovar demo page, it would be nice if the URL reflected the skeleton/terminal combination currently on the screen (and it was bookmark-able).

[0] https://www.typenetwork.com/brochure/opentype-variable-fonts...

[1] https://github.com/TypeNetwork/fb-Amstelvar

[2] https://github.com/metapolator/metapolator

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_(graphic_designer...

[4] http://www.emigre.com/EMagView.php

1 comments

The fonts are made with freshly written extensions to the RoboFont editor; notably, the original source drawings are made in quadratic bezier splines, not the typical cubic ones.

Metapolator (a project I co-founded) uses Hobby splines and has not been used so far to develop Variable Fonts AFAIK.

I filed an issue for your nice suggestion, https://github.com/TypeNetwork/fb-Decovar/issues/6