Saturday 16 June 2012

Skeleton Alphabet 3

Now for lowercase letters. We take the unit square (blue) and create a smaller construction motif (green) of size 'x' centred at the bottom:


Ann Camp suggests the x-height to be three-fifths, but if you choose 2/π (about 0.6366) things work out nicely later on (see below).


Ascenders go to the top of the unit square, thereby making them the same height as the capitals:


Similarly, descenders go below the baseline by the same amount:


In the 'g' above, the upper bowl is a circle of diameter one-half. The lower bowl is drawn by eye, according to Ann Camp.

Here are the trivial constructions:
















The 'm' and 'w' letters are constructed like two 'n' and 'v' letters glued together. Because of our strange choice of x-height, they are exactly one unit wide:



The upper portion of the 'f' is like the arc of 'r':


The tail of 'j' is a quarter circle:


The crux of 'k' is determined in a similar manner as that of the capital 'K':


The 's' is drawn by eye:


The vertical of 't' is half the height of a standard ascender:


The tail of 'y' is drawn by eye:


All this leads to the following lowercase grid, with shadow glyphs from Arial (pink), Calibri (green) and Lucida (blue):


As with the capitals, there are a few changes I would personally make, by I'll leave that until next time.

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