

Making of the FF Franziska font - adamnemecek
http://www.fffranziska.com

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keehun
I have always viewed making of fonts as a art form with a tradition as long as
written music. We take these fonts for granted, but it's amazing just how much
consideration goes into these things. I have so much respect for talented
designers like Jakob Runge. I think it's a rarity that someone has the design
chops to know what he or she wants, execute the design on paper, be able to
write hours of boring repetitive code in OpenType to get the kerning or
ligatures just right, and then make sure that each cultural differences are
properly accounted for...

As a musician, it's very inspiring when someone pours so much of their
personality and time into crafting such masterpieces. Say what you will about
the font, but it's coherent and shows you a complete aesthetic world of its
own. Beethoven's symphonies may have taken longer to write, and it may have
been more difficult, but the love I see from Runge into crafting something
that at the end of the day can be replaced by Times New Roman, is amazing and
frankly, comparable to Beethoven's.

So much respect.

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Avitas
This font, upon first review, appears to be of the very highest quality from a
technical perspective. However, it doesn't initially appeal to me
sylistically.

I would like to set a few projects with it to really get a feel for it and see
if there are any issues.

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keehun
I think that's fair for any new font. There's a reason why some fonts stand
the test of time, like Garamond, and others don't. That's not to say that this
font is not of the highest quality, which you've already mentioned.

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Tomte
The serifs remind me a lot of Calluna by Jos Buivenga. They even use the same
kind of drawings to defend this choice.

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evincarofautumn
I was thinking the same thing. The dynamics feel very similar. Exljbris is one
of the relatively few foundries I have bought from, actually, for the
consistently high quality work across a variety of styles.

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stangeek
Great way to initiate people to the art of crafting a truly remarkable font.
At this level, we're really talking about art... And I love the font - well
done!

Unless I missed it in the article, I'd be curious to know how many hours /
weeks / months it took from v1 to final version?

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george_srs
The attention to details presented in this article is amazing and inspiring.
What really speaks to me is the timelapse of all the typeface versions in one
.gif showing the progress. Now I want to make something similar for my
products.

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tux1968
Wonderful attention to detail, and beautiful results. But i just can't use a
font that has ragged numerals; they seem jarring and counterproductive. Much
prefer fonts that have uniformity in the numeral glyphs. Most must disagree
with me because oddly sized artistic numerals seems quite common in new fonts.

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jacobolus
Actually, the “oddly sized” (“old-style”) numerals are most common in _old_
typefaces, even more than in new ones (or more specifically, new professional
typefaces typically include both). The uniform-height numerals are basically
the “upper case” variants, which should typically only be used when
typesetting numerals in the middle of text in all caps, tables of pure
numbers, mathematical formulas, or the like.

When you have a paragraph of regular words, set in lower case, a “capitalized”
number is very visually heavy and distracting, unbalancing the flow of the
text.

At some point in the relatively recent past uniform-height numbers started to
become the norm, I suspect largely because of typewriters and then early
computers. (It hasn’t been until relatively recently (e.g. with OpenType) that
software could easily set numerals in both the lowercase and uppercase
versions. In the 90s, most high-quality commercial typefaces sold separate
“pro” fonts which had small caps, old-style numerals, extra ligatures, etc.,
and the typesetter had to explicitly select the relevant characters and change
the font to get those features, instead of just setting a feature flag for a
whole text block.)

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djur
Is there empirical evidence that "capitalized" numbers are more difficult to
read? I'm genuinely interested, but I do feel like a lot of typography is
based on aesthetic assessments of individual glyphs, sentences, or blocks of
text as opposed to studies of legibility.

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rbehrends
"Tinker compared old-style and modern (lining) figures and found a non-
significant advantage for old-style figures in terms of reading speed and
error rate. (Oddly, modern lining figures were easier to read at a distance –
on a billboard, for example. In other tests, capital letters were also found
to be more legible than lowercase when set large and at a distance, so these
findings do seem to agree."

From: "Taking it in – what makes type easy to read and why" [1] by Kathleen
Tinkel, citing "Legibility of Print" by Miles Tinker, Iowa State University
Press, 1963.

[1]
[http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/jager/typetinkel](http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/jager/typetinkel)

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ommunist
Upvoting this for the beautiful storytelling of the true craftsman. However,
FF Franziska definitely lacks Cyrillic glyphs.

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adamnemecek
I changed the original title "Making of FF Franziska" since it's not very
descriptive.

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itukeitto
I hate to be that guy, but if you care about descriptiveness the correct word
would be "typeface", not "font".

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raphman_
I'd guess "font" is understood by more readers than "typeface", even if it is
slightly incorrect.

