13 February 2014

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.