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Hi, everyone. I need your critique on my new script type. Since I am Japanese and have never designed a script type, I don't know if it's aesthetically good or bad. There is certain amount of alternates and ligatures, I did not post those images though.
Although this was supposed to be a display type,but one part I think that is cool is the shortened lowercases to avoid clashing the descender from upper line (see 'Alternate' section). I think it works nicely, but how do you feel?
Anyway, tell me anything you felt. I really like to know.


| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Dots comparison.pdf | 29.25 KB |
18 Sep 2009 — 5:00am
I like it very much. The ascenders reminds me of Zapfino.
I find the alternates clever and surely they improve legibility.
(but to find out if they improve readability too, it would be necessary to see a non-lipsum text)
Keep up the good work!
22 Sep 2009 — 8:56am
Thank you very much!
This time I copied the text from Wikipedia.
How does this improve readability?
22 Sep 2009 — 4:57pm
This is really good. I suggest swapping the alternate W with the basic W.
26 Sep 2009 — 6:27am
I hoped someone more expert than me could step forward.
Anyway, here are my thoughts:
1. You should revise spacing and kerning. The letters appears too tight and crowded.
Furthermore, even if this is an unconnected script, the letters’ flow should to some extent follow the one of cursive handwriting.
[cursive courtesy of fellow typophile Jess Latham’s Learning Curve]
2. The dot of the “i” resembles a little too much an acute accent.
4 Mar 2010 — 9:46am
It's been 9 months until I upgraded this. I hope someone will give me an advice.
I reset kerning and redesigned character design according to riccard0's advice. Thank you very much.
Now it has wider spacing and natural flow (If you look at the word American, you'll see the difference).
However, I did not want to redesign the i dot.
4 Mar 2010 — 11:55am
Looks very nice. Some beautiful letters.
I'm unsure about the /r/ in "rather"
You may want to vary the ascender shapes a bit more - see the repetitiveness of "lack of tidal heating"
Would you consider giving a little more weight to the i/j dot (maybe just towards one end of it)?
6 Mar 2010 — 11:45am
Thank you eliason.
I am pretty sure that strange looking small r variation is not my invention, but I learned it in calligraphy class.
All right, it looks like everyone is feeling odd about i. Actually I also do a bit (I felt that i is leaning too much).
I redesigned not only dot but stem too. Obviously this change was adapted to every ligature including i.
In order to vary ascender characters, first l of ll ligature is shortened and d is very slightly shortend as well.
Overall, I exepct designers to utilize Opentype feature as I already prepare several variation for each asending characters.
Each of them has at least three other variations with the exeption of f.
Right now, if the ascenders or descenders of f crashes, there is no way to avoid it.
I think f should be made shorter from the very start so that it does not crash.
6 Mar 2010 — 3:24pm
You could do a variant f without descender.
6 Mar 2010 — 3:49pm
This is beautiful stuff. For ll the one with left shorter. And I looked at you previous post, and noticed that bl should be similarily ligatured also.
But you should consider that i; it's just confucing with all European languages with accented glyphs. You don't have to use a round dot, use stem width.
7 Mar 2010 — 3:22am
Also, I understand that that type of tittle (i dot) is typical (and almost logical) of some style of script.* But it really is at least distracting and unpractical if one would want to use the typeface for setting a number of european languages. However, you could create two version of i (to use in different stylistic sets).
* see, for example:
http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/wilton/carnegie/
7 Mar 2010 — 5:19am
Thank you all.
I designed new i dot but I still prefer previous one despite practical problem. This is probably unquestionable, but which one should be the standard if you would contain both?
Also, I added f alternates thanks to riccard0's clever idea (Thank you very much!). I think these characters solve not olny the problem formerly mentioned (middle row), but others like the crash of gf or pf (bottom row) which seemed to be unsolved.
7 Mar 2010 — 5:53am
In my opinion, the longer, weighted dots (purple in that last image) strike a great balance.
7 Mar 2010 — 8:10am
which [i dot] should be the standard […]?
The longer, more calligraphic one, because it’s more in line with the overall feeling of the typeface, regardless of its possible uses.
7 Mar 2010 — 8:52am
Thanks, I will leave dots as they were.
Anyway, I made a PDF sample of French and Spanish text which tontain lots of accents. But, how can I upload PDF files?
7 Mar 2010 — 9:52am
You should be able to attach it to the initial post by hitting "edit" near the top of the thread.
7 Mar 2010 — 5:02pm
Thank you. Uploaded successfully.
First page with slashed dots, and second page with pointed dots. To me, the first one looks good enough and latter one does not improve so much (probably because I am careless, or it can be much better). How do you feel?
I think there is nothing wrong if i dot does not looks like acute. Is there any other accent that might be confused with?
8 Mar 2010 — 2:21pm
How many diacritics do you plan to support?
Can you show us something like this:
àáèéiìíïòóùúü?
10 Mar 2010 — 4:56pm
àáäâãèéëêìíïîòóöôõøùúüûçñšž
Actually I don't know anything else.
20 May 2010 — 10:49am
Congratulations on the release! :-)
http://code.google.com/webfonts/family?family=Tangerine
18 Jun 2010 — 3:52pm
This is great! Omedetou! Prefer this over Zapfino! Thanks for including the "å" :)