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.
