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!
