Last night I posted the current state of the Jetsonville font. Uppercase characters, lowercase characters, numbers, many punctuation and other characters: complete. Well, not complete, but there. Existing. Something, anyway.
But what I posted is really a first draft, even though some of the characters have been through ten or fifteen revisions already. As I look at this first draft, with all of these characters together, next to each other, in one place, I see some work that needs to be done.
Just from casually looking at all the characters together, I see some differences between characters that need to be harmonized. Some uppercase characters, such as A, C, D and V, show considerable variation in stroke weight along the arch. The ends of the arch are thinner and the center of the arch is thicker. Other uppercase characters that are composed of two arches, like the B, E, M and W, do not show as much variation in stroke weight.
This inconsistency needs to be fixed. But how? Make the single-arch characters look like the double-arch characters, or vice versa?
My first thought is that I like the variations in the stroke weight. I think they are one of the things that give Jetsonville its unique character and feel.
So my first impulse is to try to introduce more variation in the stroke weight on the double-arch characters, and the other characters as well, to make them all harmonize with the current state of the single-arch characters.
I might try this and find that it does not work, in which case I will then try lessening the variation in stroke weight for the single-arch characters to make them more harmonious with the double-arch characters. I guess we’ll see what happens. I won’t know until I try.
It occurs to me that this process of designing letters using Adobe Illustrator has similarities to the process of sculpting in clay or marble (neither of which is in my skill set). The shape of a letter on the screen is infinitely plastic and malleable, and I can make it look any way I want by moving points and pulling Bezier handles. If, as the apocryphal story goes, Michelangelo’s task in sculpting David was to chisel off all the marble that didn’t look like David, my task in creating Jetsonville is to move those points and pull those Bezier handles until the letters look like Jetsonville.
