Questions about your finished typeface: Rapunzel
Q 1. Did you achieve the level of quality you envisioned in the final polishing stage, or does your typeface require some additional refinement? Explain your answer.
I am actually slightly disappointed in the quality. My concept and vision is not reasonable with my current resources. I find even with a macbook pro with 4 gig of memory and no other programs running I continually crash Adobe Illustrator. I am actually shocked that my font has been such a challenge especially in a program I know quite well like illustrator. I find that even with my last revision to the typeface where I removed over half of the shapes, the characters still are not playing nice. I have actually done most of the assignments multiple times as when I try to save the final it crashes and corrupts the file.
I think the font could be refined more, In my opinion you can always put more work into any project, I do need to find a way to make the font play nice with the software.
Q 2. What did you learn through the experience of developing your typeface? Was there anything about the experience that was different than what you had anticipated?
This is actually the second typeface I have created. I am sad to say the first one went much better. I have learned that putting too much detail into characters can create huge problems with the font. It is better to use a simpler clean design. The interesting part is that is typically how I would design, and this experience was more out of my comfort zone.
Q 3. If given the opportunity to design another typeface, what about your process might be exactly the same or possibly different? Explain your answer.
If I had to design this typeface over, I would start probably digitally over my hand sketches. Trying to simulate the detail I created in my sketches was not hard, but it created other significant issues. Starting digitally would probably have kept me from doing such detail. I think one of the best things I learned was dividing the characters in to sub categories. This made creating the characters much easier and quicker.
Questions about your type specimen sheet roughs:
Q 1. Summarize the information you've gathered from the review of your project at this point.
An interesting point from one of my classmates was that my typeface is so detailed to begin with, a cleaner, simpler design for the specimen sheet may be in order. I think I may have been trying to go too creative and connecting too much in the specimen sheet instead of letting the font use its own voice.
Q 2. Discuss any major or minor changes you might make to your recommended design to improve its quality.
I think one of my 4 roughs is close. I just need to choose a direction and clean it up. This mostly would consist of adjusting the spacing, margins, colors and opacity of the design. I also may add some elements to help lead the viewer through the page.