Final (for now) reflections

 Time for final reflections on the Jetsonville capstone project.

What surprised me? The feeling I got when I saw one of my font’s use testers show me samples of things they had created with my font. I was not prepared for how great and affirming it felt to see someone else use my creation and make such amazing things with it! (Click on this link and then scroll down to see the amazing things.)

What else surprised me? The degree to which kerning and spacing adjustment has been automated by the FontSelf font-making plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. I thought I would be spending hours and hours and hours adjusting things so the font looked good. I have in the past spent hours and hours adjusting the spacing and kerning of other fonts that I didn’t design. But FontSelf did a pretty decent job, and I found I had to do only a bit of manual kerning to supplement what FontSelf generated automatically. 

How did the project evolve? The project evolved pretty much according to my original plan, for which I am very grateful.

Biggest challenge: Designing the lowercase “a”, which took over 50 iterations. But I like how it finally worked out.

Original Jetsonville lowercase “a”

I still like the idea and concept of the original lowercase “a” I designed. I liked the motion and rhythm it added to the typeface. I just wish it would have been more readable. The final lowercase “a” doesn’t have the rakish personality of the original “a”, but it is much easier to read and plays much better with the other characters in the font.

Final Jetsonville lowercase “a” (and the train it reminds me of)

And it has its own nice personality, too. It reminds me of the front of the Union Pacific M-10000, a pioneering streamlined train from 1934. That’s obviously before the middle of the twentieth century, but I will take my styling influences wherever I find them.

Takeaway: Now that I’ve designed my first font, I know things that will make my second font, and other subsequent fonts, not such a big deal.

What’s next? This may be the end of the capstone class, and the end of this master’s degree program, but it’s not the end of the Jetsonville project. I still need to get the font submitted to MyFonts.com to see if they will accept it for sale on their site. Then there are other fonts to design, including both weight and style variations of Jetsonville and a related version called Jetsonville Wire, which would be Jetsonville without thick and thin strokes. I am thinking of experimenting with using Javascript programming to draw the starting font outlines for Jetsonville Wire, which would allow me to use the Javascript I learned in this program. And who knows what other ideas will occur to me?

So we’ll see where this leads.

What did typography look like in the original “Jetsons” television series?

Having designed a type font inspired by “The Jetsons,” it’s a fair question to ask what the typography of the original “Jetsons” television series looked like.

Answer: Not like Jetsonville. Not at all.

For a show with such amazingly futuristic architecture, the lettering seen on “The Jetsons” was pretty unremarkable. It’s pretty consistent with lettering that would have been seen elsewhere in 1962, when the show premiered on television.

Maybe the creators and animators felt the lettering had to be unremarkable, so that it could be read quickly. Or maybe they didn’t want the lettering to compete with the architecture.

Here are some examples of lettering from the original “Jetsons” television series.

What makes Jetsonville “quirky”?

Some of the keywords associated with Jetsonville are “quirky,” “playful,” and “fun.” What exactly is it that makes Jetsonville quirky and playful and fun?

Most normal typefaces have a directional stress. It may be vertical, or it may be angled, usually to the right. You can draw parallel lines between each letter, or through the middle of each letter, to see the stress. And the repetition of the stress gives a typeface its rhythm.

This stress derives from calligraphy, when handwriting was done with a pen dipped in ink. This is what gives letters based on calligraphy their thicks and thins and the direction of the letters’ stress.

The design of Jetsonville, on the other hand, is not based on calligraphy. Instead, it is based on architecture—specifically, an arch. And that arch is based on engineering, and that engineering is based on mathematics. That gives Jetsonville a very different feel from a calligraphic typeface.

Jetsonville is based on an arch, and that arch does indeed have thicks and thins. (I am contemplating a version of Jetsonville, called Jetsonville Wire, that does not have thicks and thins—all the strokes are a uniform weight.) The original arch that Jetsonville is built from was created with an oval Illustrator brush oriented vertically. The brush was moved in the shape of the arch, and that is what gives the arch its thicks and thins.

However, Jetsonville then plays with this idea of directional stress. It plays with it by rotating the arches in different directions for different letterforms. So, looking at a line of characters in Jetsonville, there are different directional stresses in different letters going on at the same time. The A and M, for example, have the thickest part of the arch at the top of the letter form. The B and D, however, have the thickest part of the arch on the right, and the C and K have the thickest part of the arch at the left. V and W have the thickest part of the arch at the bottom. J and L have the thickest part of the arch at the lower left and lower right.The stress, and the rhythm, are all over the place. 

Some people may find it unsettling. But I hope more people find it quirky, and playful, and fun.

At any rate, it’s different than a “usual” type font.

2018: Jetsonville development sketches from Design in Context

From the vault: Six sketch sheets I made in 2018 during the initial concepting and development of Jetsonville.

Notice the name at the top of this sheet: “Jetsonian.” I seem to remember that I was thinking of calling this new font “Jetsonian Gothic,” but I only wrote “Jetsonian.”

Here you can see the various futuristic graphic devices I was considering for the font: antennas, plain or with floating rings or springs; shapes on stilts to match the buildings in “The Jetsons”; “Forward Look” motion, inspired either by Chrysler or by Nike; triangular collars as worn by Jane Jetson; three horizontal lines; bullet shapes; Saturn shapes; trapezoidal screen shapes, with or without fins; kidney shapes; and the eventual shape I chose, parabolic arches.

This second sketch shows that I was at one time thinking of using Univers as my starting point. I was thinking about what letters would descend from other letters, and how the basic shapes of the letters, either round or square, could be distorted to be more futuristic.

This third sketch shows more experimentation, such as adding antennas to A, B, G, I, J and P; adding Saturn rings to O and Q; and using arches to construct A, B, D, E, F, K, L, M, R, S, W, X, Y and Z. The shapes of those letters in this sketch are very similar to the shapes of these uppercase letters in the finished font. No antennas, though, made it into the finished Jetsonville.

Fourth sketch: More character development and the start of formulating some design rules for the font.

This fifth sketch expands on the design rules for Jetsonville. On this sketch I start making notes about possible production processes (Illustrator or FontForge?). I also mapped out the method of creating the primal arch that I ended up using: drawing a parabolic arch in Illustrator and stroking it with an very thin oval brush with a vertical stress. (This primal arch is documented in the project’s website.) 

This sixth sketch shows not only the capital letters but also ideas for numerals, punctuation and other special characters. The designs shown here are very close to the finished Jetsonville font. And this sketch also shows that by this time I had arrived at the font’s appellation as “a fan font” and at the font’s final name—Jetsonville.

6.3 External feedback from Subject Matter Expert

I recently received some very helpful feedback and critique from Chank Diesel, the subject matter expert for this project. Click here for the “External feedback from Subject Matter Expert” slide deck.

From “Design in Context”: Jetsonville proposed design process

The idea for the Jetsonville font arose in 2018 during the “Design in Context” class at Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD), one of the classes at the start of this academic degree program.

Here, from my archives, is my original proposal for the design of Jetsonville. With all the style variations I proposed in this document, I was nothing if not ambitious.

Wed., 9/26/2018

Jetsonville proposed design process

1. Find a parabolic arch from The Jetsons or an actual building from the same time period (late 1950 to early 1960). This will be the outside of the letterform stroke.

2. Find or construct a compatible arch for the inside of the letterform stroke.

3. Put two arches together as a unit from which letters will be constructed. End upright arch stroke (i.e. opening downward) with blunt horizontal cutoff.

4. This parabolic form can now be used to construct letterforms. 

• Form is intended to be duplicated and the resulting forms joined together to create letterforms.
• Form can be rotated 90 degrees.
• Form can be mirrored.
• Forms can be overlapped if desired. (Try it and see if it works.)
• Forms should not be stretched or compressed if possible.
• Created letterforms should fit into a traditional square. Letterforms should have a consistent height and a maximum width of the square.
• If the above square-proportioned letterforms are not feasible, the square could be extended horizontally to 125% or 130% to produce an extended or expanded typeface.

This will produce Jetsonville.

5. Blunt ends could be parabolically rounded to produce Jetsonville Rounded.

6. Either Jetsonville or Jetsonville Rounded could be obliqued to produce Jetsonville Oblique or Jetsonville Rounded Oblique. Letterforms would remain the same except for the slant; the oblique form would not be a true italic in that no letterforms would be drawn dramatically differently.

7. Either Jetsonville or Jetsonville Rounded could be outlined or inlined to produce Jetsonville Open or Jetsonville Rounded open. These typefaces could be used with black outline and white fill, or the outline could be one color and the fill could be another color.

8. Either Jetsonville or Jetsonville Rounded could have shading applied to make the letterforms appear three-dimensional. This would create Jetsonville Shaded and Jetsonville Rounded Shaded.

9. Either Jetsonville or Jetsonville Rounded could be distorted using an envelope or warp grid to produce as-yet-unnamed typeface variations. 

• The envelope would be a quadrilateral polygon, but the sides would each be a different length and each corner angle would be different.
• The baseline created by the envelope or grid could remain horizontal.
• Or the envelope or grid could result in the left side of the letterforms dipping below the baseline and the right side of the letterforms being on the implied horizontal baseline. Thus, almost every letterform would have a descender. This would not be too disruptive as current typesetting practices are well acquainted with the concept of descenders in type characters.

10. A range of different weights of Jetsonville could be produced by varying the stroke weight of the parabolic form used to construct the letter forms.

11. In all variations of the typeface it is important to keep the strokes weights, and therefore the typographic color of the letterforms, consistent.

Jetsonville character lineage chart (uppercase & numbers)

More sausage-making: A student in my cohort, who describes herself as a typography aficionado, asked if I was going to prepare a chart showing how all the various Jetsonville characters are related. That chart, for uppercase characters and numbers, is shown above.

One supposed typographic truism is that to design a font one first designs certain base characters, and then other characters are variations of those base characters. Jetsonville is probably unlike most other type fonts in that it has one base character—the arch—except the arch really isn’t a “character” as such (although it is available as an OpenType alternate glyph).

So, we take the base arch, add a crossbar, and we have “A”.

We turn the base arch upside-down and we have “V”. Widen the bottom of the arch for “U”, close the top of the widened arch for “O”, and add a tail to create “Q”.

Shorten the “V” arch and add a vertical stroke under the arch to create “Y”.

Rotate the “V” arch 90 degrees, flatten it and mirror it to make “0” (zero). Flatten the zero and stack another flattened zero on top of it to create “8”. Take the same flattened zero and add an angled stroke above it for “6” or add an angled stroke below it for “9”.

Rotate the base arch 90 degrees counter-clockwise to create “C”. Add another, smaller arch, opened up to about a 90-degree angle, to create “G”. Add a vertical stroke to the “C” to create “K”. Flatten the “C” and mirror it to create “X”.

Rotate the base arch 90 degrees clockwise and add a vertical stroke to create “D”. Compress the height of the arch by half (actually slightly less than half so the two arches overlap) to create “B”. Remove the vertical stroke for “3”. Mirror the “3” for “E”. Take the top half of top arch of the “E” and add a tapered vertical stroke and a thinner horizontal stroke to create “F”.

Remove the vertical stroke from the “B” and rotate the two arches 90 degrees counter-clockwise to create “M”. Rotate “M” 180 degrees to create “W”.

Take the bottom arch of the “E”, flip it horizontally, adjust the top edge of the arch so that it’s horizontal, and add a vertical and horizontal stroke to create “5”.

Remove the bottom horizontal arch from “B” to create “P”. Add back the bottom arch from “B”, but mirrored, and blend the two arches to create “R”. Remove the vertical stroke from “R” and mirror what’s left to create “S”. Mirror “S” and adjust the top and bottom of the character to create “Z”. Rotate  “Z” 90 degrees counter-clockwise and adjust to create “N”.

Rotate the base arch 180 degrees, flatten it, and add a dot derived from two arches, mirrored and filled in, to create “I”. Remove the dot and add a crossbar to create “T”. Lower the crossbar and add another “I” form to create “H”.

Remove the dot from “I” and add a diagonal stroke at the top to create “1”.

Open up the base arch to create “J”. Flip “J” slightly and adjust to create “L”. Rotate “L” 180 degrees and angle the vertical part of the arch to create “7”. Add a horizontal stroke on the baseline to create “2”.

Finally, make “L” half-height, angle the ascender and add a vertical stroke to create “4”.

And presto! Uppercase characters and numbers are ready to go!