Latest Font

Developing a new font, based on an 1918 sign painter’s card, by William H. Gordon, and trying to work in a similar manner in which that sign painter was required to for their job. With some font development, there is a certain amount of working in shapes rather than strokes; outline items in a technique most illustrators use when working in tools like Adobe Illustrator.

However, with several recent efforts that have been focused on turn of the last century sign painter’s cards the focus has shifted to creating the digital output in a similar stroke fashion as those artisans. 

The latest in this streak of families is Poster Print. The original card had the upper and lower case glyphs but nothing else that a modern font requires. Many of our recent development efforts have replicated extended Latin character sets, creating new glyphs to fit the requirements of our digital existence. 

With this latest family, which is much more decorative in nature, we have focused on the basic Latin character set for its first release. And in doing so, we have found a bit of a bug in some of our daily tools: Adobe Illustrator and an Illustrator plugin called Fontself. 

Within Adobe Illustrator a stroke has its width, its corner, and its cap; each one of these within the tool has 3 options and each one is set by the application’s default state. While working on this font, I set the strokes to rounded caps and curved corners; which worked for most items. However, somewhere along the way a stroke or two reverted to the default status which was hidden behind another stroke.

So, when this glyph was imported into Fontself, the conversion “read” the left stroke’s flat cap, instead of the right stroke’s rounded cap – which overlapped the right and hid the effect. I shared this issue with the good folks on the Fontself board and through the chat with helpful members there, found a simple solution.

Joining these two stokes and ensuring the caps and corners were set to round, the conversion went as expected. Now much of the error was user-initiated but there is a bug in the conversion that lies in the Adobe/Fontself camp. Since there is a simple work-around I am not sure that it will be rectified in the code, but I wanted to share the solution I was able to find by “debugging” the work.

And so, here is the latest work-in-progress font family from designomatt, test named Poster Print.