[jamiewilson]

Hey everybody. I'm the designer of Norwester. Thanks for the interest and feedback. Yea, the font is really limited right now. Please use it judiciously as there are a lot of glyphs not accounted for, as digitalengineer pointed out. Please let me know if you have any special requests or catch any thing not looking right. Thanks again!

[brandons]

Here are some possible improvements that jumped out at me:

- Certain letters including C, D, and S appear shorter than other letters, because of their round tops. Optical illusions cause letterforms with round edges (C, O, S) or pointed edges (A, V, W) to need to extend slightly farther in the rounded/pointed direction to appear to be the same size as other straighter shapes. This is called “overshoot” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_%28typography%29).

- The spacing and kerning both need work. Letter pairs such as OV, FR, IA, AI, KE, EY, OX, MY, AP, and RT are too far apart. I’ve found that it’s easier to kern if you look at your outlines upside-down and backwards (I know Fontlab Studio has a built-in option to preview text in this manner, Glyphs might as well). Doing so helps your brain regard the outlines purely as shapes without getting sidetracked by their semiotic significance.

Another trick to type design is understanding that mathematical/geometric precision do not always result in the appearance of mathematical/geometric precision. Measurements that should theoretically be equal (such as the heights of letters as previously mentioned) often need to be fudged in order to look equal to the imperfect human eye.

The forums at Typophile are a great place to have your work critiqued by professional type designers (http://typophile.com/forum/1). Or, feel free to contact me if any of this is interesting and you want to know more. :)

[jamiewilson]

Very helpful. Thank you very much. I'll keep tweaking the kerning and consider those optical adjustments moving forward.

[richforrester]

The flipping horizontally & vertically hint is ridiculously awesome, and works for just about any design or artwork.

Anything that requires composition can be improved by flipping the work one way or another. Lots of digital artists use this all the time to check anatomy too.

[willchang]

Peanut gallery comment here, on what is a really handsome font. On the S, the angularity at the two ends of the middle stroke seems at odds with the larger radii almost everywhere else. The slant of the stroke stands out in a pleasing way, but the corners are jarring. I wonder if rounder corners would preserve the first effect while mitigating the second. I suppose 2 and 5 would have to be reworked a bit if you go down this road.

[digitalengineer]

Hi, I interviewed Jos (the designer turned typographer from the link inside the other tread) once. Ran it through Google Translate, perhaps you'll find it usefull: http://translate.google.nl/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A...

[jamiewilson]

cool. thanks for the link.

[praxeologist]

The website shows 93 glyphs but I get 96 in when I load it in Illustrator. It seems like there is duplicate closing single and double quote marks, then there is a blank glyph too.

The degree symbol is not showing up. I feel like the @ symbol doesn't mesh with the rest of the font, maybe make it more rounded/disjointed and continuous where the inner swirl is.

One of my long term projects is a brand with a weather symbol (fog) being incorporated so I kind of got my hopes up for that at first, but this is easy enough to make my own really.

[jamiewilson]

Thanks for the heads up on those issues. I'll take a look at what's going on there. This is my first font so I'm still new this troubleshooting stuff. Thanks for your feedback!

[blueblob]

Is the name a play on the storm type of a nor'easter?

[EdwardDiego]

I was wondering if he was a New Zealander, in Canterbury we have a very characterful foehn wind we call the nor'wester. Its associated arch of cloud is called the nor'west arch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nor'west_arch

We're not exactly imaginative with names around here.

[specialist]

Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

[arvinjoar]

Request: Å, Ä, Ö

[monsterix]

Nice piece of work. Can we know how you made 'em? Which tools did you use, steps that you followed? Can people fork it and add those missing glyphs to make it complete?

[jamiewilson]

Thanks. I used a combination of Glyphs (http://www.glyphsapp.com/) and Illustrator, and of course some sketching. This was originally just a custom wordmark for a side project and then I decided to just keep expanding to the rest of the alphabet. I definitely plan on putting all the source code on Github for people to contribute to. That would be awesome.