a place

I just got featured on ilovetypography.com. I’m flattered. For any of you who don’t know the site, go check it out NOW. It’s a great resource, very accessible, and has a wonderful community of commentors.

I have found that I am quite fond of typography. I enjoy looking at libraries of typefaces. I like reading about the history of a typeface. I try my best to use type well.

The I Love Typography blog is a great place to go to if you find yourself strangely entertained by all things type-related. There are many articles for beginners and experts, as well as interviews and tutorials. The best thing is the community feedback, and the discussions that take place in the comments. Great fun.

Well, there’s also a series on the site called “So you want to create a font” (here’s parts one and two). Inspired by that series, and by some sketches of type that I saw on the site and around the web, I sketched some characters in my little A5 sketchbook.

Yes, that’s my attempt at a Helvetica ‘a’ on the top left. You know, you wouldn’t expect it, but sketching letters is fun.

This geometric type looked easy to vectorized, so I fired up Illustrator and started constructing. I ended up with the word ‘can’.

Looks alright. I think I need to sketch the rest of the alphabet before I vectorize it. Those lines in the back are the shapes I used to construct the characters.

This one I tried to trace in Illustrator, but it killed the entire character of the font. I really like how it looks in the sketch, and I’ve drawn out some more letters and they look good. I guess I also need to carefully draw the whole alphabet for this one, and do it larger.

The best thing about this is, it’s got me sketching more. Sketching is good :-)