OUGD404: Type Family

 Using the principles processes and resources introduced in the first three studio sessions, develop a series of practical investigations into the development of new letterforms and fonts.. 

I chose to adapt Impact and did so by thinning out the stems and creating serifs. I wanted to retain the 'impact' of the original typeface but present it in a much more refined manner.

From here our next step was to produce a new type family consisting of regular, bold, italic and light versions of the font. To do this we were encouraged to experiment with the limits of what a glyph can be and continually ask the question: How bold can bold be?

I found the development stages of production manageable if not tedious, repeating the process of tracing letterforms and making slight adjustments. I feel in some stages I may have lapsed in my technique and caused a few jaggedy stems and irregular serifs, however on review I believe this gives the typefaces that little bit of extra personality and charm.

Then came the digitising stage which proved to be a lot more fun than I had anticipated, two days sat at a computer with very little need to take a break (I enjoyed it that much).
began by establishing the needed criteria, the x-height, descender height, baseline and cap height, I did this by first importing each typefaces 'X'.

Importing the Scans- Light

So after importing the scans I rasterised and image traced them to create a simplified outline to work with. I then moved this onto a new page and used it in order to gauge the baseline, x height etc. 

From there it was a case of building the individual strokes. Keeping each stroke as a separate shape meant that it could be used for other letters later on (like with the H examples below I used the straight stem from B, the cross bar from A and the curving tail/leg of the lower case y). Using individual strokes also meant I could create a much more even looking letter form, in the case of X I only needed to crate one stroke which could be reflected and used as the second, this produced a much cleaner looking glyph. 

The 'H' example

Finished Type Family: Name Unpact

Due to this type being an initial modification of the font Impact, I decided to name my new font, Unpact as a tip to it's original form. And overall, despite there being an issue with some glyphs I rather like it, the bold variant being my personal favourite (it kind of looks like a 60's style type and would looks good spelling the word groovy and peace.) I did find a bit of mismatching with the lowercase glyphs, it only dawned on me when using the new typeface in words that some look like individual lowercase glyphs and some of the just look like smaller variants of the uppercase glyphs. I will however defend that this creates a certain charm that only comes with imperfections. 

My least favourite (to produce and to look at) is the italic family, the angles are all off, it was impossible to create certain glyphs, the S i had particular difficulty with and looking at the entire face it just feels all awkward and off.