Routine Roman

I’ve been toying with a revival of Clearface by Morris Fuller Benton for the last few months and recently found some higher quality scans of the ATF specimen books that feature it.

My initial goal is to redraw at least the same glyphs as in General Gothic so they can be used together.

The longer term plan is to adapt it for use alongside HEX Franklin with matching metrics for a long-form, long-term book project I’m working on.

The version I’ll release initially has a working title of Routine Roman, but we’ll see if that sticks.

Interesting WE ligature at the entrance of Kasteel de Haar in Utrecht.

It turned out much better than I thought, but the lightest weight still feels a bit alien to me. It looks like it will end up with the whole 9×9 grid.

My next project – a variable revival of Microgramma. I’m still undecided about whether to create a lighter weight below the regular. I’m not undecided about wanting to create narrower and wider widths than stretta and larga though.

After wrapping up the initial release of General Gothic, I did some housekeeping and found another font that I’d let languish.

Art Disco is precisely what it sounds like – a font where Art Deco meets Disco. You could even get some decent retro sci-fi lettering out of it with a bit of effort.

It’s bare-bones right now – uppercase letters and numbers only. I’ll add some punctuation, accented characters and hinting down the line.

Get it from barry.mieny.com/fonts/art-disco.html

I’d run out of steam a few months ago after drawing roughly the same design three times in a row, except for the numbers of the light master. This morning I finally sat down and hammered out the last ten glyphs.

Not an original design, but here’s version 0.1 of General Gothic. It’s an interpolated family based on Lightline Gothic, News Gothic and Franklin Gothic.

It’s far from perfect, but I’ll iron out the kinks over time and increase the glyph coverage.

Get it from barry.mieny.com/fonts/general-gothic.html

This is (working title) Barry. It’s based on a logotype I’ve been using since around 2008, and I still need to come up with a more appropriate name.

I started work on it shortly after the logotype, but there are still some things I’d like to do before considering it 1.0.

It already has comprehensive diacritic coverage but needs more fleshing out.

The swash feature enables an alter ego, and there’s also support for narrow diacritics on IiJj, and narrow Jj to avoid collisions with descenders.

This is Benjamin. Franklin Gothic, but not quite. It’s barely at 0.0.1, with only some capital letters, from scans of old type catalogues found online.

The Ultra Condensed master is loosely based on the existing Extra Condensed but adjusted from 56% to 50%.

The Ultra Expanded master is based on more math than I’d done in all the years since I left school.

There are issues, of course. Spacing and kerning need attention. As do the counters on the extremes. And more masters are needed.

Working on a revival/reinterpretation

After toying around with the idea for years now, I’ve finally started on a revival/reinterpretation of an old typeface named Perspective.

There’s still a lot to be done, but I’ve started with the redrawing the faces of the available characters.

These characters have already been cleaned up - fixing stem widths, angles, proportions, etc.

I don’t want to change the characters too much, as I’m afraid it could lose some of its character if things diverge too far. So, yes, I’m aware that the R looks a bit wonky and the crossbar on the G looks a bit weird, etc.