The Big Crit (Term 2)
Apologies, loyal readers, for not updating on Monday. Our big critique with guest stars Christian Schwartz and Chester Jenkins was last night, so needless to say I decided to (this is my M.O.) immerse myself in wholly unnecessary design tasks. Complete with fake book jackets shown in-situ, I made an 18 x 24” specimen.
It went well, and Brightcut was received enthusiastically, and I got some good, specific feedback — none of which was a surprise, but it is good to get consensus around issues at this stage. Because Brightcut is so wide in its individual lowercase letters, some things just don’t work well in the system, namely the s and the a. And of course there are still some spacing issues, but what I didn’t see was that a lot of it may be fixed by reducing the space around my round characters — I had been tweaking the vertical characters in my attempts to fix the discrepancies.
As a group, we got some great feedback and pointers too. Christian had a lot of helpful things to say about proofing and designing in context, having a strong notion of who will be using your typeface and why, and not being afraid to look beyond a corporate-style superfamily when developing other weights and styles. (“Maybe your family is a roman and two kinds of italics” !!) Chester made some good points about finding the spots that define your font’s personality and then letting other letters be plainer. Perhaps the dual-quote of the evening was when Christian said, “Not every letter needs to be a special thing,” and Chester followed it up with, “it’s like kids, they’re not all awesome.”
Awesome.
