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.
