Website overhaul halted

If you've been to the website recently, you've probably noticed a lack of information there. I was planning to overhaul the website and turn total FontGeek DTF into a professional design-for-hire firm, but those plans have been changed.

This fall, I'll be going to school to become an English teacher and, as such, I won't have any opportunity to design new typefaces or alter existing designs at all for the foreseeable future.

With that, total FontGeek Digital Type Foundry, Ltd. is now closed. Any additional questions regarding licensing can be directed to perjys547@gmail.com

Duty now for the future,
Nathaniel L. Halley

Typography as satire

I like a keenly-crafted satire. I also like typography. So, when I came to the realisation that I have most (like 90%) of the typefaces used by the logos of corporate america, I decided to put them to good use and make them into satirical, yet honest, slogans. I have to admit, this isn't a new idea... there's a tumblelog called, oddly enough, Honest Slogans that specialises in this type of thing, but I gave it a go anyway. Here's what I came up with.

Abandoned NBP typeface designs

Now that TFG is on indefinite hiatus, I should mention that there were a few fonts in development that will probably never see the light of day. Some of these I designed between the announcement and the release of CasaleFinale, but most were failed experiments or ideas from earlier in TFG's history.

"Unicase"
An unnamed unicase handwriting font. The letterforms are similar to Economica and Bodega Sans with hints of Univers UC in places. Essentially JustAnotherDay v.2.

Halley Script 2
Using the same pen as HalleyScriptThin (which wasn't really all that thin, was it?) I drew the alphabet again with a 7th-grader's level of handwriting.

Centurion
Designed for a cancelled project at one of the defunct animation studios around here (that's why the project was cancelled--they went out of business) Centurion is a large pixel font inspired by the Sinclair ZX Spectrum with a hint of MS System. Monospaced. It would have supported ASCII, the basic Latin accents, Greek, and Cyrillic. I finished enough of it that it's usable and I could release it if I wanted to. But right now, it's my Notepad and BASIC editor font. Maybe someday...

Klassiq Strangular
A redraw of NBP Klassiq using hexagonal letterforms. The word "Strangular" was a result of the Haagen-Dazs Method.

SooBawlz Pro
After Mike Pilmer used SooBawlz NBP on the Devo NHM teeshirt, I noticed several glaring problems with the design that I meant to correct but never got round to. SooBawlz Pro would have had 2 weights--Solid and Outline--with lowercase letters and all the SooBawlz design problems fixed. I gave serious consideration to charging money for this font, but in the end all I could think of was "Why?"

"Pixel 7"
I shelved this one fairly early on. Eventually, it came down to releasing this font or (I think) Mercutio NBP. Mercutio won. Design-wise, it's basically another Univers/Arial/Helvetica pixel combo, with elements of each. I chose Mercutio over this one because it was simply too large to be easily legible.

ErbosDraco 3
Less of something that I would have released and more of an experiment. ErbosDraco 3 is a straight facsimile of that popular bitmap font for cheap LCD screens (calculators, road signs, scrolling shop signage, that sort of thing).

Guidewire
A failed attempt to recreate Skyhook Mono in Fontstruct. Too much would have needed postpro editing in Type, so I gave it up.

"Serifs"
A hand-drawn serif font. I wrote like normal, then added serifs to everything.

"Dinglebats"
An experimental hand-drawn dingbat font. I drew old Letraset icons and some stuff from Wingdings and Webdings--this was with MyScriptFont, so it probably wouldn't have turned out usable if I'd scanned it.

CasaleFinale Small Caps
Just as it sounds--CasaleFinale with small caps in place of lowercases. I was using the uppercases from CasaleTwo as the small caps, but decided that anyone with Microsoft Word can make the same effect.

CasaleFinale Micro
I had been considering a grand send-off for the Casale redraw and my descent into obscurity, but didn't do that for some reason. Anyway, CasaleFinale Micro would have been a pixel font based on CasaleFinale.

"Love Letter Hand"
A really stupid idea by all accounts. I don't do "swashy" very well, but this font sure has enough swashes for the entire NBP collection, had I been dumb enough to release it. The first 1-star rating would have been from me, that's for sure. Okay--imagine a design combo of Hermann Zapf, Kimberly Geswein, and Salvador Dali or someone. Wasted a perfectly good leaf of paper, that did.

"Statue Park"
I printed out a MyScriptFont template and gave it to my mum. I said, "here, fill this in and I'll make a font from your handwriting". I guess I forgot to mention that the template had boundary lines. It was my mum's handwriting, just all over the paper and through several boundary boxes. The name? Inside joke. Get your own.

Spectrum
A font inspired by the Tempest drum machine logotype.

GlitchGirl
An octagonal uppercases-only font similar to Cinema Gothic (if a bit more angular). It has full QWERTY support, but nothing else. I had planned at least the basic Latin accents and a few symbols, but something distracted me.

GlitchBoy
I was going to release this one! I even made a type specimen in the Fontstruct UI and everything... but then Fontstruct decided to corrupt the saved file and it was lost. I wanted to release GlitchBoy and GlitchGirl in the same set, but with GlitchBoy gone, that became a non-issue. Design-wise, it's like Grishenko Novoye, but less severe-looking. It was a small font to begin with--I think the widest character was only 6 tiles wide (probably M or W). I liked this one... oh well.

Smart Patrol Display
Another attempt to give smoothed lines to Smart Patrol NBP (after Schutzgitterhaus-Grotesk).

Cellblock Narrow/Text/UC
A suite of typefaces based on Cellblock NBP. Narrow and UC (ultra-compressed) would have been narrow weights for limited space in heading lines. Text would have been suitable for reading.

Fairlight
Long ago, I designed the UI and sound samples for a Nintendo DSiWare drum machine app that I could never find anyone to make. Fairlight was meant to be the logotype and heading font for that programme. It's a unicase font that somewhat resembles Wide Awake by pizzadude.dk. It has full QWERTY support and an alternate alphabet and number set in the Fullwidth block. Also, in an unusual design move for me, it has a real live actual copyright symbol.

Meyer Serif
I thought Meyer Gothic and Meyer Unicase turned out rather nicely. Unfortunately, no one else did. Meyer Serif would have been the 3rd font in the series.

Whatevs
I threw practicality to the wind with this design and drew each of the letters in a different style. I only had enough creativity for the uppercase set, however. There are characters that look like pixel fonts, characters that look like stick figures, characters in grids, on microchips, twisted, half-smooth/half-pixelly--whatevs. Fontstruct as a Moleskine journal.

"Mario 64"
I tried using Fontstruct to make the lettering from Super Mario 64's message boxes. But then I found a website where someone else had done it, so I just downloaded theirs and shelved mine.

CasaleFinale is done -- so is TFG

I decided that "CasaleFinale" was a better name because it rhymes that way. Like I said, it's my 3rd and final draw of my first typeface, Casale NBP. I think the metrics are a bit nearer to the cover of Shout. It has full ASCII support as well as some accented Latin (everything you need for Spanish, French, German, and that lot) Greek and Cyrillic.

And with that, total FontGeek Digital Type Foundry is officially on hiatus.

If I ever decide to start it back up again, I would prefer a better platform than Fontspace. The rating system is massively fucked up from all the trolls who spend their day watching new fonts come in and then rating them as low as possible. While it may be all fun and games to them, if you happen to stumble across Fontspace as a designer looking for a decent font, you're probably going to immediately put out of your mind anything that has less than 3 stars. That's representative of 87% of my own work, to say nothing of all the hobbyists who get scared away or convinced their work is rubbish by 4 trolls clicking BAD all at once.

Oh well. Anyway, I would welcome suggestions on where else I could release new material and re-post some of the old stuff.

"Until we meet again, this is General Boy for DEVO, INC. Duty now for the future!"

--General Boy

And now, a public service announcement

Don't get me wrong. There's nothing I like better than to see one of my designs in public, and BrightonTwo is one of my most popular typefaces (behind ErbosDraco)

That having been said, one of the most recent public encounters I had with an NBP font was on a teeshirt where it was being used to render a very sexist motto. I'm not going to mention what it was or where I found it because, as I've recently come to find out through Tumblr, there are Jack Thompson-types who will assign blame to anyone they can find. I don't need them demanding a boycott of total FontGeek DTF just because some pseudohuman used one of my fonts on a bad shirt.

Obviously, I can't control how any of my designs are used. That's the nature of "free"--free to download, free to use, free to display. I would ask, though, that you use them responsibly. Don't be that guy. If you're going to be that guy, use Comic Sans.

And now, a disclaimer:
total FontGeek Digital Type Foundry, Ltd. (“TFG”) is not responsible for any messages which are rendered in its designs, beyond the official typeface specimens and design examples made by TFG staff. All fonts made by TFG are free for commercial use and TFG is not, as a general rule, informed about the public display of any of its designs, nor does it have any control over how the design is used. TFG cannot be held responsible for any offence taken by an individual or group over the content of messages rendered in TFG-designed typefaces and will not make any attempt to stifle the creative freedoms of any graphic designer who uses them.
While not explicitly implied in the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 3.0 unported license used by TFG for its designs, the disconnect between foundry and third-party designer is, in our judgement, necessary to encourage free creativity and will not be reconsidered.