Here is the current state of the Jetsonville font:
Please note that the new characters this week include three ligature characters: ff, fi and ffi. There are no ligatures for fl or ffl. I tried many designs for these two ligatures, and none of them worked as well as just the letters f and l. (A word like “souffle” will use the double-f ligature followed by an l.) The design of the f and l characters in Jetsonville is not conducive to ligatures —unlike the f and l characters in most fonts, where fl and ffl ligatures are often a nice addition.
In the next few weeks I still may add some alternate alphabetic characters. But for now the Jetsonville font is complete enough that I can turn my attention to some of the other deliverables of this project.
For example, here is the current state of the motion-graphic type specimen for Jetsonville. To my mind, it’s pretty much done, actually. I started out to do an animatic (a preliminary version) and before I knew it I had created the actual video:
The video is also available on Vimeo here:
A few notes about the video:
- The music track came first. It is a compilation of both the music that was used for the Jetsons opening and the music that was used for the closing credits (music composed by Hoyt Curtin). The intercutting was done using Adobe After Effects.
- Oh, there is also some non-Jetsons music for a few seconds at the beginning. This music, too, has space-age connotations. And notice the similarity between the melodic line of the opening music and the melodic line of the Jetsons theme.
- The voice track was created using text-to-speech software (LOVO Studio). It’s not as good as I would like it to be, but I think it’s better than I would have been able to do had I tried to voice the narration myself.
- The opening visual was taken from the opening of “The Jetsons.” In the original opening the zooming-in-to-Earth visual suddenly explodes into colored triangles that then disappear to show a blue sky with the Jetson’s flying car zooming through it. I updated the animated shatter to a more 21st-century After Effects shatter effect.
- The Jetsonville letters zooming in and out and around the sky were created using the Apple Keynote application, which has some amazing built-in special effects. The footage from Keynote was then imported into After Effects and the video was finalized in After Effects.
- The transition at the end of the video, where the blue sky is closed off by two sliding doors, one from the left followed by one from the right, is a nod to the end of the original Jetsons opening sequence.
- In 2018, during the “Design in Context” class for which the uppercase characters of Jetsonville were originally designed, I created another video to show off the Jetsonville characters. That video was also primarily created using Keynote. But it was much longer, because every one of the uppercase characters had a chance to frolic onscreen and be admired. But that video never received a soundtrack, and it was over 2-1/2 minutes long. With all the lowercase characters, numbers, punctuation and other special characters that are now part of the Jetsonville font, a video where every character gets to take a bow would be way too long. So the new video has a soundtrack and narration, shows the characters in groups, and is just over a minute long. That length will make this new video much more usable for my final capstone presentation.
Next steps, and request for feedback
Now that the Jetsonville motion graphic is pretty much done, the next things on my horizon are the website and the type specimen images. I have ideas for both of these, so it’s just a matter of putting something together based on my ideas.
How does this all seem to be working so far? Does anybody see something that isn’t working or that could be improved? If so, please let me know during our next meeting on Tuesday evening, and thanks!
