roger, wilco.
Retrospective: Big Automobile typeface
+Design on 2 January, 2009
For me—given that visual design is not where I’m best—looking at old work is often a cringeworthy experience. This time it’s not the case. Here’s my first effort (2004) at producing an original typeface from the ground up. This one is inspired by the badge faces synonymous with it’s namesake - the large American cars produced around the ’50s and ’60s.
It started out life the old way. Idea generation on sketch paper, then 1 mm graph paper for glyph refinement before digitisation using Typetool—a rudimentary vector typeface design application, all that was available to me at the time.
Anyone who’s tried something similar won’t be surprised to hear that character spacing, and in particular, kerning pairs consumed nearly as much time as then design concept itself. Kerning pairs—in brief—address the whitespace relationship that occurs between each and every combination or pair of characters. It’s not uncommon for hundreds, if not thousands of kerning pairs to accompany a complex typeface.
A few critical points:
- Stroke width could be fattened up a little
- Uppercase N just ain’t right, actually, a lot of the upper set could be reworked - A, O, Z specifically
- Baseline shift for numerals (old style figures or text figures) are nice, but should be accompanied by titling figures
- Limited set of characters
- Single weight only
Maybe one day you’ll see Big Automobile redux, this time built with better tools, like Fontlab Studio, and developed into a full family of weights, characters and alternatives.
Olympic information systems & design
+Design +Observations on 25 August, 2008
The Olympics in Beijing has stirred up the usual discussions in the design community. Khoi Vinh is a fan of the information system and design behind 1972 Munich Games, which has a whole site dedicated to it.
I prefer Lance Wyman’s tri-line designs for Mexico 1968.
