Tuesday 17 January 2012

Treatise - my first professional font!

It was about time I started to try and make some money from my plethora of hobbies... Today my first professional standard font goes on sale! You can take a look at the interactive previews at myFonts.com:


Treatise is serif (with the sticky-out-bits (: ) font with some fun quirks. It has very big round terminals on the top of letters like r, c, k and s and a big blob in the top of the o. These all work together to make it look a bit more handwritten. It also uses the single storey a and g (i.e. like you write them, not like you type them) which also helps maintain the handwriting feel. Treatise uses some fancy Opentype features which let you adjust the way letters appear depending on what neighbours them. I have used this to make the long tail on the capital R and Q nestle neatly around curved letters like u, e, a, etc. It also means that letter combinations like ff and fl where the f can crash into the top of the next letter are replaced with a nicer looking character combination.




While it has some cheeky little design features which make it very unlike most serif fonts it is still subtle enough to sit happily in a paragraph of text. Having said that it also has enough character to make a title interesting. All in all I am pretty happy with it as a design!

The software used to design and code this font was entirely free and open source:
Sketching - Gimp
Outline design - Inkscape
Glyph coding and font generation - FontForge

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