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.

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

CasaleThree, TFG's final project for a long while

I discovered to much to my abject horror that CasaleTwo is too short! I don't know why I didn't notice it sooner, like maybe when I made CasaleTwo, but the entire typeface is 2 fontstruct tiles too short. So, guess what--time to make it AGAIN!
Yeah cool whatever. "Shout" is still my favo Devo album so I owe it to them to make the font as close as I can to the original logotype.

Anyway, I know I've threatened to stop the NBP collection before and then suddenly I made 10 more fonts, but I'm serious this time. I haven't made a new font since around August, about the same time I posted the last entry here. I've been caught up in other things lately and typography has sort of fallen below the radar. Instead of saying definitively that I'm closing total FontGeek Digital Type Foundry, I'll just say that it's going on indefinite hiatus.
I still get ideas every now and then, but there's "idea" and there's "spend 4 hours on Fontstruct".
So, just in case I never get back to TFG, CasaleThree is going to be a worthy stopping point. Since there's Cyrillic in Casale One, there's going to be cyrillic in CasaleThree-- also accented Latin and possibly greek. I decided to stop making Hiragana and Katakana after a Japanese typography site called one of my fonts "hard to read". I just don't know enough about the letterforms to make it legible.

I guess I should talk about why I'm not doing fonts right now.
First, I got a new job recently-- one of those 8-5 types as a receptionist. It's not all phones all the time-- I do the occasional mail-run and I take the bins to the rubbish and recycling. Basically your standard-issue office grunt.
Next is that Tumblr has absorbed my life like a sponge. I'm managing 3 blogs at the moment and none of them are about typography.
Finally, no one is making any new and compelling fonts anymore. The nearest I've gotten to being excited about using a font was with Fira Sans, the new Mozilla font. Erik Spiekermann, designer of Officina, Meta, and Unit, among others, made that one. On Fontspace, all that's showing up anymore are handwriting fonts and the occasional Fontstruct-build minimalist piece. Not to malign the designers of those fonts, but after sifting through 47 screens of nothing but barely-legible script typefaces, one gets rather bored.

I'll try to make something before CasaleThree, just to say I've done it, but after that... no more. Not for a while anyway.

New FontGeek resources: PaintFont & FontPunk

The developers of MyScriptFont have branched out into a couple new ventures.

PaintFont is sort of MyScriptFont on steroids-- several improvements here. First is the printable template: instead of the same template for each project (which was noticeably lacking in a few important punctuation marks) it's now customisable by character set. You specify what language you're planning to type in and it adds the necessary characters to the template. You can also manually add characters to the template by pressing keys on your keyboard. When you're done adding characters, print the template and start drawing.
Another noticeable difference with the template is that the cells are larger with marks for the cap height, baseline, and descent. The larger cells mean less distortion when the server-side application generates the font, plus the obvious physical space factor which allows you to draw more complex lettering or dingbats.
The quality of the generated font has also gone up. MSF had a tendency to run strokes together if they were too close. In comparison, my pen was running short of ink when I filled in the PaintFont template and the imperfections in the strokes showed right up in the final product! Also notable is the auto-correcting feature-- if you accidentally mark outside the boundary box or if your printer didn't print the template straight on and everything has a bit of a slant to it, the generator fixes the problems automatically. Gone are the days of having to edit baselines in Type!
One problem I've found is that the website's tutorial page gives you the wrong information in regards to scanner resolution. It suggests 300 dpi, but none of the templates I scanned at that resolution were able to be read by the generator. As soon as I put it up to 400 dpi, that corrected the problem. In terms of what format to scan to, I've had good results with PDF. MyScriptFont wouldn't even look at PDFs, so that's a saved step if your scanner only outputs to that format. No more converting.

Next is a tool called FontPunk. Basically what it is is an effects generator. It doesn't make new designs, it only alters existing ones. It has a number of features to make fonts more flashy, such as outlines and shadows; or more practical, such as line thickness and slanting. However, it has no way of differentiating between fonts you make yourself and fonts by a professional type foundry, meaning that every effect it can apply to your own font, it can apply to any other font on your computer. Purely in the name of scientific research, I was able to make an italicised version of Inspira Small Caps with this tool. So, it's on the honour system-- whether you observe it or not is up to you. Either way, it's another fine tool to add to the list of FontGeek resources.

My favourite NBP fonts

Since I've already pointed out the NBP fonts I wish I could delete, let's try this now. Here are the NBP fonts that I think turned out rather nicely.

CasaleTwo
This one's obviously at the top of the list because it's a better version of the Shout font. Shout is still my #1 Devo album. Plus, I like how the letterforms are all in perfect proportion with each other.

Plutonium
This design was inspired by Skyhook Mono (free from Fontsquirrel) It's basically Skyhook-on-Fontstruct. I was seeing how much of it I could make. It's an incomplete characterset that's likely to remain incomplete, but I still like it for headings. It's got all the basic punctuation and numbers anyway, so that's good.

FortySeven Micro
Maybe because it's my 47th design (well 48th actually, since it came after FortySeven) but this one's my favourite of all my pixel fonts. It's really too bad people don't use pixel fonts much anymore because it would be perfectly suited for menu text on Nintendo DSi or 3DS.

Skyline Beach
This is like the best parts of Russell Square combined with Ubuntu and a bit of Arial added for good measure. The banner art on Fontspace shows it being used on a SketchUp-built signboard because I honestly think it would work famously for extreme-scale graphic design or signage. There's also art there that shows it on the opposite extreme, at pixel font size. Since I didn't use any half-blocks in Fontstruct to make Skyline, it could be used for small displays just as well as large ones.

Grishenko Novoye
I don't know why I didn't just make Grishenko unicase to begin with. It totally looks better that way. I mean, with the correct application of ALteRNaTInG CaPs, you can make it unicase but Grishenko Novoye does it for you. I'll admit that look is sort of becoming a bit dated now, but I don't really care. I'll stay with a design trend until I tire of it and I'm not tired of unicase just yet.

Mindfuct
Same reasoning here. It's like Spire and Grishenko Novoye got married and had a son who turned into a spiteful anarchistic teenage rebel. Anyway, I'm sure that the Bopomofo characters don't look a thing like Bopomofo should, but the thought of being able to spell "mindfuck" (check spelling) in Chinese was quite appealing to me at the time.

AWODEX: Absent without a decent excuse

I haven't been doing much FontGeekage lately. Mostly we can blame Tumblr for this. I discovered recently that Tumblr is a much more exciting place than Fontspace or Fontstruct. Not only are there fellow FontGeeks there but representatives of all my other interests too. Poetry, visual art, stickfigures, Devo, that kind of thing. Beyond that, I've been busy making my Fantom X sound like a Fairlight CMI rhythm sequencer. So I guess I've been busy with other things is what I'm trying to say. Just to show that I haven't totally abandoned typography, here is some of the type-related stuff I've been posting to Tumblr.

Erbos Draco goes viral!

This is a screenshot of http://countdown.depechemode.com. It clearly shows the use of Erbos Draco Open NBP! Cool! I'ma have to listen to them now.... I think they did some Simlish stuff for The Sims 2.
So even though this is only the second time I've ever seen one of the fonts I made in use... they used the OLD VERSION! Like last week sometime I redrew a few characters in the Erbos Draco family to make it less similar to other LED screen styled types on Fontspace (like LED Phone and TPF Display). Plus, I drove past a real actual LED sign that had been there for years that had the exact same upper G as Erbos Draco has. So that's why I messed with it. Then, someone points out to me that Depeche Mode is using v.1.0 (version ONE-point-freakin-ZERO!) @_@ So I decided that, since its being used now, I'd bring back ED Open and ED Regular from the old version. And I did. Because I'm a nice guy :)
Well anyway, it's cool that somebody out of the 2100+ people who've downloaded it decided it was nice enough to use for something. 

So what exactly is DIFFERENT about Erbos Draco from other LED types on Fontspace?
For one thing, there are symbols and lowercase letters. The lower letters don't go below the baseline (because there isn't a "below the baseline" on a scoreboard display). Most other uppercase Rs look like Arial or Interstate. ED's looks more like Univers or Helvetica. The 7 is based on Akzidenz-Grotesk.

You can o/c download Erbos Draco from Fontspace.
http://www.fontspace.com/total-fontgeek/erbos-draco-monospaced-nbp

Oh FYI. The name "Erbos Draco" has nothing to do with dragons. It's an anagram of "score board" ;)
Let's hear it for pixely LED styled typefaces!

BTW I had an interview today for a graphic design position at a local advertising agency so you might see alot more typefaces of mine showing up in places!