OUGD601: Practical - Critiquing - Critique from Tomato Košir
Tomato (yes his real name is actually Tomato), is a Slovenian type designer, and was also my tutor whilst I studied in Slovenia. He has a really strong eye for type design, and gave me endless feedback on a typeface I was working on over the summer. I sent him a message displaying a small specimen of my typeface, which he gladly looked at. I also sent an OpenType file of the typeface's progress, which he used to show me which characters needed work. The evidence of this all is below.
Joe Leadbeater
Hi Tomato! I hope you are well. As you probably know, I am working on a typeface with a few people from TypeClinic. If I send you a PDF, would you mind having a look and giving me some feedback on it?
Tomato Košir
Sure. Sounds interesting Joe. Is that a joined project? Who are you working with?
Joe Leadbeater
Great! The project was to do with an essay I have been doing for my final year at university - The essay looks at the positives of computers on type design. One obvious positive is that files can be sent globally for different people to work on. So I planned to work on a typeface with people all around the world, sending the file around for different people to add to.
Joe Leadbeater
The original reference was an old metal inscription, from near me. I like the idea of taking something local, and adding diacritics and other characters for the typeface to be available all around the world. Another positive of digital type design is that lots of extra characters can be included in one file. For this reason, the typeface will include lots of alternate characters, swashes, ornaments, etc.
Joe Leadbeater
oh, and I have been working with Jan, Franzikska, Marsi, and Clara may be adding some characters. I am also hoping to get feedback from as many type designers and type foundries as possible!
Tomato Košir
I hope it works. One thing is to contribute an idea, another to design a compatible glyph.
Joe Leadbeater
I'm not sure what you mean I would love for you to add a glyph if you had the time.
Tomato Košir
Well, it wont be such a problem to add diacritics, if you mean that, but more difficult to design whole characters. For instance: you design letter "s", and Franzi "ß". It might be difficult for Franzi to go along your design. Everybody has a different set of eyes.
But we can try.
Joe Leadbeater
Okay, I shall very quickly make a pdf to send to you, with the characters in. You can decide if you would prefer to add characters or just tell me what you think needs to be changed. Thank you Tomato!
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- Friday
Joe Leadbeater
Hi Tomato, here is a PDF for you to look at.. Obviously since it is late, it can wait until tomorrow
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- Saturday
Joe Leadbeater
And here is the OTF file... I was experimenting with fractions and old style numbers, but I think I may remove the old style numbers. The fractions need a lot of work, I have just started them! Let me know what you think. Thanks!
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Tomato Košir
Joe, the idea is interesting, but I think the font should be first properly fine-tuned. And there is still a lot of work to be done. Problematic are C, F, G, J, M, Q, 0, 1, 2, 5, 9 and especially S. When you'll have a solid base, you can send it to others. Do you have a deadline to rush it?
Tomato Košir
But I can see progress from your TypeClinic font.
Joe Leadbeater
Yeah the problem I have is that the deadline is the 11th of January. I can see it is not quite perfect, but my tutors are not type designers, so quantity is better than quality for the deadline. But after the deadline I will still give it lots of work
The result so far has been the combination of everyone's work, I was planning on getting most of the characters in place to then tweak together
If you have the time, could you print out a page with the C,F, G, J,M, etc and show some corrections and scan it back in? (Just like when at type clinic you would draw on my print outs where nodes could move!)
Tomato Košir
Hmmm, we can try that, but the problem is, they don't need just little bit of fine-tuning, but a couple of days of redrawing, comparing etc (with a mentor behing your back), workshop style.
Joe Leadbeater
Of course I will also credit your help in the project, on the final Behance and personsl website post
Tomato Košir
I'm not worried about authorship, he, he..
The problem is you should first draw the basic characters properly, then you'll get a solid basis for your thesis.
Joe Leadbeater
Okay, we'll try that. It will probably be far from finished for my deadline. But the aim is to show the concept that a font can be worked on around the world. If the font looks good it's a benefit of the experiment!
The S I have been especially struggling with
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Tomato Košir
Here are the quick correctors.
Also you should redraw zero. It is too olive shaped - too unstable and incompatible with the font.
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Joe Leadbeater
Okay great. Thanks a lot Tomato, I'll make the changes later when I'm home
Sunday, 4 January 2015
by Unknown
Categories:
Critiques,
OUGD601
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Joe Leadbeater
