18 June 2008

[font_design] ZehnKatzen 5 - A Funky, Retro, OCR-Style Font

1618.


So, I had FontStruct open and I was worrying around with ZehnKatzen 4 (the Oregon-shaped font) and was wanting to try something else out. I get bored easily sometimes, and ZehnKatzen 4 turned out to be quite a bit of work (more on that perforce).


I was thinking about the way me and my friends used to play at OCR-style fonts, like what you still see these days on paper checks (you remenber these, yes?). FontStruct is ably suited to this particular task:







So you have a nice display font to evoke those memories of computer-y style Sci Fi book covers and things of that nature. Since Firefox 3 has fits displaying the Flash that gets generated, if you can't see the above, follow this link to the display and download page.


It has A-Z twice (the idea of designing a minusucle scared me a little just now, and I may revisit this) complete numerals, and an incomplete set of punctuation which I intend on fleshing out to completeness


Latterly I have found that FontStruct has its limits, which seem to hinge on how many bricks you're using in the FontStruction. To generate a realistic Oregon outline, I used quite a few bricks, and copied and pasted and then carved the letter out of the state shape. But as more information became retained by the interface, after a while, a curious thing happened regardless of which browser I was using: the browser would 'hang' for just a few moments while the save was attempted, then came back from the process actually not having committed the change.


I'll be dashing off a letter to FontShop asking them about this problem. Maybe nobody else has come upon it. But some of them seem quite complex.


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