Time for final reflections on the Jetsonville capstone project.
What surprised me? The feeling I got when I saw one of my font’s use testers show me samples of things they had created with my font. I was not prepared for how great and affirming it felt to see someone else use my creation and make such amazing things with it! (Click on this link and then scroll down to see the amazing things.)
What else surprised me? The degree to which kerning and spacing adjustment has been automated by the FontSelf font-making plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. I thought I would be spending hours and hours and hours adjusting things so the font looked good. I have in the past spent hours and hours adjusting the spacing and kerning of other fonts that I didn’t design. But FontSelf did a pretty decent job, and I found I had to do only a bit of manual kerning to supplement what FontSelf generated automatically.
How did the project evolve? The project evolved pretty much according to my original plan, for which I am very grateful.
Biggest challenge: Designing the lowercase “a”, which took over 50 iterations. But I like how it finally worked out.
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| Original Jetsonville lowercase “a” |
I still like the idea and concept of the original lowercase “a” I designed. I liked the motion and rhythm it added to the typeface. I just wish it would have been more readable. The final lowercase “a” doesn’t have the rakish personality of the original “a”, but it is much easier to read and plays much better with the other characters in the font.
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| Final Jetsonville lowercase “a” (and the train it reminds me of) |
And it has its own nice personality, too. It reminds me of the front of the Union Pacific M-10000, a pioneering streamlined train from 1934. That’s obviously before the middle of the twentieth century, but I will take my styling influences wherever I find them.
Takeaway: Now that I’ve designed my first font, I know things that will make my second font, and other subsequent fonts, not such a big deal.
What’s next? This may be the end of the capstone class, and the end of this master’s degree program, but it’s not the end of the Jetsonville project. I still need to get the font submitted to MyFonts.com to see if they will accept it for sale on their site. Then there are other fonts to design, including both weight and style variations of Jetsonville and a related version called Jetsonville Wire, which would be Jetsonville without thick and thin strokes. I am thinking of experimenting with using Javascript programming to draw the starting font outlines for Jetsonville Wire, which would allow me to use the Javascript I learned in this program. And who knows what other ideas will occur to me?
So we’ll see where this leads.
