Fredoka variation font

[Ben Nathan]

Hello all! 

I started working on a variation version for Milena's B. Brandão Fredoka One, continuing my work on this lovely font in order to create a bigger type family with full latin support and Hebrew.

I started with drawing the 6 masters needed, first with creating a new black style that is bolder than the existing bold, than the light, and so on :)

Here's the design:

Any thoughts about the masters weight? should I go more light/black? 

Or for the condensed/expended decisions i've made?

More updates soon, cheers!

Ben

[Pablo Impallari]

Great to see Fredoka growing!

All look great to me except the Bold Expanded, its looking like a "reverse contrast" font.

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Un Abrazo
Pablo Impallari

[Dave Crossland]

On 17 November 2016 at 20:22, Pablo Impallari <impa...@gmail.com> wrote:

All look great to me except the Bold Expanded, its looking like a "reverse contrast" font.

I agree, would be good to keep it monolinear with the needed optical corrections:)

[Ben Nathan]

Cool, thanks for the input Pablo and Dave, much appreciated!

I'll do it monolinear

[Alexei Vanyashin]

On Thursday, November 17, 2016 at 8:22:19 PM UTC+1, Pablo Impallari wrote:

Great to see Fredoka growing!

All look great to me except the Bold Expanded, its looking like a "reverse contrast" font.

Hi Ben, 

Rounds in Light, Bold may be more super-elliptical. I like to use the Glyphs 'Fit Curve' presets for this. 

In Bold Expanded you may wish to adjust the contrast in rounds O, a, o. 

To avoid clogging an expanded font may be slightly lighter that a proper Bold.  

[Ben Nathan]

Thanks all for your comments, I took them into consideration:

I'll post more letters this week, thanks!

Ben

[Alexei Vanyashin]

Ben, 

This looks better. 

In Expanded you may wish to narrow down /n to accommodate for the large white mass inside. I think the O in expanded still looks lying on its side (90° rotated). To remedy this /B and /O in expanded may just be slightly narrower. In lowercase /a, /o the problem is resolved now. 

The amount of width extension from Regular to Expanded may be non-linear, but individual for each glyph depending on the black-white shape balance. 

Spacing does not seem to be consistent yet. For example /o in Condensed isn't symmetric, and /e in LightExpanded is too close to /n. I wonder if you will find the HT LetterSpacer plugin useful for this?

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[Ben Nathan]

Thanks Alexei !

Your comments are great. I haven't worked on the spacing yet, i'll post an update on that in the near future. 

For now I finished working on the Light weight, it's a first sketch but it's pretty decent. 

I working on the condensed & extended and will post them on the next update.

Thanks!

[Alexei Vanyashin]

Thank you Ben, 

It is good to see the improvements. 

I had a look at the original font. Looks like it has some contrast issues that can be improved. The diagonals in /W and /w are not compensated. I am not sure if this should be kept as a "feature", or needs to be amended. I also find that the /v is too wide in the original design. 

On the other hand it is important to retain the original font character, and find a balance between a cleanup/expansion, and a new font design. It is up to you to decide upon the amount of changes you wish to introduce to the original Fredoka design, and the willingness of the original author to accept these changes. Here are some more improvement suggestions:

Light:

dot accents on /ij are very light. 

/v is too wide

/x is too wide, not compensated in width

/y the apex is too high

/X is too wide

/V is too wide

/M is too wide

Bold:

dots on ij may be just a little bit wider. 

/v is too wide

/s the middle made ve

/w more width compensation in the middle

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[Ben Nathan]

Thanks Alexi for your great input, it's very helpful and you raised some questions i've been asking myself regarding Ferdoka. 

Ideally, I prefer not to change the original design, that's why the V, X are so wide or the legs of the R, Q are in that angle. Saying that, I agree with your inputs, i've noticed the contrast issues, and I started working on the Light version to understand this font better.

I agree and think it would be better to create some changes to the original design. I started making (not drastic) changes like you suggested. I will keep testing this changes because I got liking to Fredoka's original funky style.

Attached is my progress: The Light & Bold + Extended Light & Bold.

I'm still working on the extended, so some curves could be better :) I'll post an update soon with the condensed styles.

Thanks!

Ben

[Alexei Vanyashin]

Good progress on this. Some more observations,

Light

• /y looks too narrow. Compare it to /v.
  
• /k with different limbs looks questionable
  

Light Expanded

• I would tilt the long diagonal of /y counterclockwise

Black 

• /Y looks too narrow

Black Expanded

• I would revise the middle horizontal bars in E F, compare them to H, G
  
• /V is very wide
  
• /e the middle feels overcompensated. I would try to re-distribute the thickness

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[Dave Crossland]

Hi Ben

I encourage you to take more of a free hand in this case - whereas the hebrew extension was to "Fredoka One" itself (at https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fredoka+One) this will be published as a new set of families (https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fredoka - https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Fredoka+Wide - etc etc) and so you can freely change all aspects without any 'legacy update' concerns. 

The only concern is being true to the original design intent, and even then, the original will continue to be available as it is. I think all the proportional changes that Alexei suggested could work well and not diminish the intent. 

I also suggest the /G could become a little wider overall in all masters. 

Cheers
Dave

[Ben Nathan]

Thanks Dave and Alexei, great input. 

I've made the correction and i'm close to finishing all the masters, i'll update this week with all the numbers and signs in 6 masters (plus the Hebrew).

Attached are the 6 masters, almost finalized. i've started testing them in text and working on spacing and fine tuning, so more updates soon.

Thanks!

Ben

[Ben Nathan]

Hi All!

Quick update and some questions. 

Things I did:

- Finished creating all 6 masters.

- Did Interpolation, added 1 weight to test the middle (regular style), to test the condensed (semi-condensed stye) and expended (semi-expended style).

- Did spacing and kerning.

Things to do:

- Add the full latin support. I wonder which glyphs I need to include, any suggestions? 

- Test the webfont. Is there a test someone wrote for variation fonts I could use?

- Finalize. I'm still testing and improving the font, it's all minor fixes but they are important.

I'll post another update next week with the full set of characters and test pages.

Cheers!

Ben 

[Ben Nathan]

Hi All!

I've updated my git with this project - see it here: https://github.com/hafontia/Fredoka-One/tree/gh-pages/Variation

See attached mov for a test i did with fontview.

Cheers!

Ben

[Dave Crossland]

Hi Ben

Awesome work! 

Marc, please queue this up sometime later this week :)

The Variable Fonts export in Glyphsapp is still in beta so I suggest we just take whatever is exported and push it to Google Fonts Early Access with a different family name, like "Fredoka VF Beta" 

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[Marc Foley]

I'll get round to it this week.

[Milena Brandão]

Hello everyone!

I'm the original author of Fredoka and I just want to say, as far as I'm concerned, you guys have "creative carte blanche" to make corrections and adjustments to Fredoka. I like to see it growing and making "babies"! 

I created Fredoka without any formal technical education on typography or font making and many of the technical terms you guys use to communicate are a foreign language to me. So I'll just be the proud granny here, hehe.

I don't see every thread update, so forgive me if I don't follow up. If anyone wants to get in touch with me for any reason, you can reach me at milenabdesign.com

Keep up the great work!

Cheers,

Milena

[Dave Crossland]

Hi

Thanks Milena!! You are too modest :) 

Cheers

Dave

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[Adam asseraf]

hey,

cant seem to install the font on windows and have it recognize all the weights, is it possible to split the ttf to multiple files?

On Sunday, December 4, 2016 at 10:52:11 AM UTC+2, Ben Nathan wrote: