Year: 2015

Obviously I want my typeface to have some kind of purpose, not necessarily to be used on an important document or as the new font for IKEA, but I didn’t see any point in creating something that was already in use. When I was conducting research to find inspiration on what kind of typeface I wanted to create, I looked at copious amounts of geometric fonts and there was definitely an empty hole that my typeface could fill.

Most geometric typefaces are all very similar. The most common using thin lines combined with bold shapes, but I could never find one that used repetitive lines in a way that filled out a letter (similar to what I want to achieve). Below you can see a collage of the fonts that I believed to represent geometric typefaces as a whole. As you can see there is definitely nothing out there that is similar to what I am trying to achieve.

Common Geometric Typefaces

One challenge that crossed my path whilst creating my font was whether or not to make it Serif or Sans-Serif. Typically, geometric fonts are sans-serif as the serif disrupts the flow and the symmetry of the lettering but I thought it would be an interesting twist and it would give me my own kind of ‘style’. I tried playing around with this but I didn’t think it worked at all. In stead of creating my own style it looked like I had used the pen tool on Illustrator with my eyes closed. I scraped this idea and just decided to stick to a generic sans-serif geometric typeface.

I really enjoyed creating my geometric typeface. It gave me a chance to experiment with different tools and skills over a wide range of platforms. As I come close to finishing my final typeface I had a brain wave and I’ve realised what I can do to complete it and make it look more professional. I am going to completely remove all of the vertical lines in the type and replace them with horizontal lines – giving the type a stripy look whilst maintaing the geometric style.

If all goes to plan then this typeface should look extremely interesting and visually stimulating – almost like an optical illusion. The lines horizontal lines will guide your eyes around the type and will flow nicely between letters. I think this is a very hard thing to achieve without using a cursive font, but with the right tools I am sure I can make this typeface look better than ever before!

Further continuing the development of my typeface, I noticed that adding the extra line made the typeface look uneven. Because of the slant in the vertical lines in the lettering. Adding two parallel lines in a horizontal position made it look uneven and didn’t give it a good look- so I decided to add a further two lines and to change the starting point and the end point of them.

I think this typeface looks a lot better than my other two, it looks more tidy and professional. I’m still not entirely happy and think it still needs a bit of work but it is definitely along the right lines of what I am aiming for. To improve on this typeface I am going to continue adding horizontal lines to fill the letters out, and maybe get rid of the vertical lines.

Geometric Typeface 3

In my opinion the first typeface I made needed quite a bit of improvement. I wanted to try and expand on it and make it more dynamic and interesting. Continuing with this line of thought I played around with pen and paper and came up with an idea to add another horizontal line to each letter. This made the typeface look a lot more unique and professional. I think it still needs quite a bit of improvement but it is definitely a good advance from what I have previously made.

Geometric Typeface 2