I had a very productive spell of delivering new tools for writing and reading Shavian. I even started a blog. And then I went silent for a spell, at least from your perspective… in reality I have been going down a number of rabbit-holes.
I thought I would maybe come up for air for a minute, and tell you what I’ve been doing since I released the web version of Shaw-Spell: I have been delving into typography.
I’ve loved type design for a long time, starting in my early teens. I would design posters, and do lettering for my own comic strips. Asides from sum very primitive 8bit fonts for the Commodore 64 back in the eighties, I had never designed my own full typeface, though.
After playing around with ligatures in Inter-Alia a couple of weeks ago, I decided I wanted to learn more about typeface design, and maybe try my hand at designing my very own. The original idea was to learn enough to be able to adapt an existing font to be usable to teach Shavian handwriting – including the common additional ligatures used in shavian handwriting.1 But, as it turns out: designing a typeface is hard! Learning to use the software (Glifs 3.0) Was the easy part. Figuring out what works and what 𐑛𐑳𐑟𐑩𐑯𐑑 in terms of the psychology of human perception turns out to be very labour intensive. It also turns out that the lack of a lot of prior art makes for a very limited intuition for what the right spacing, widths and stroke weights are for Shavian.
So I took yet another detour and designed the roman letters in my new typeface too. Yup, that was actually a lot easier than the Shavian, for the afore mentioned reason of basically halving looked at hundreds of different type faces, every day of my entire life, and only ever having seen half a dozen or so in Shavian, and only for the past 15 months or so.
I can’t wait to unleash my new typeface on the world. It is maturing, almost ready… almost ready…
Okay, okay, you probably figured this out already, but this post is typeset in my new font. I have only just started work on getting the spacing and widths sorted out; the kerning you see so far is just ad hoc. And the stroke weights aren’t as even as I’d like them to be quite yet, but its getting close.
I designed a sans-serif typeface as I felt there was room for a few more legible Sans typefaces – in particular I think we need something in between Ormin and Inter-Alia. This is my “first iteration towards that goal.
This typeface is called Bernie Sans,2 and this version should really be considered alpha, at best. The bold and italic instances are just place-holders for now. Today, I added Evan’s additional VS1 glyphs to the typeface (‘among many’ other changes), so 𐑻︀, 𐑺︀, but also 𐑒︀, 𐑢︀ and even 𐑜︀ are supported. Let me know what you think of far in the comments below!
A quick tl;dr in the Roman alphabet: I have been digging into the wonderful world of typography, and have been working on my own typeface for the past couple of weeks. Watch this space for the first official release of Bernie Sans!3
-Joro
Footnotes
- Specifically, I was thinking of adapting Inter-Alia or the remarkable Playwright – a font that was developed specifically for teaching handwriting. It has already been adapted to Shavian once before, but I am looking to approach it entirely from the perspective of handwriting. ↩︎
- The name bernie Sans is just a working title, really. I am all ears for any better ideas. It definitely improves upon my original Bernie Shaws, but written Bernie Shores in roman. Groan. ↩︎
- Yes, those were the accompanying roman glyphs! My first typeface kind-of-deal. ↩︎
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