The Making of
acid sans
A Typeface Design Process Journal
Above: three of many typefaces used for inspiration, all sharing the wavy theme. Right: first round of sketches attempting to establish a concept.
The inspiration I initially gathered at the beginning of the process was very diverse in style, but as I started the sketching phases, I kept going back to typefaces with wavy elements. I wasn’t finding anything that felt like a viable concept, and continued on to experiment with other styles.
I went through several more concepts and almost committed to a handwritten brush pen typeface before deciding to look to the Memphis Group for one last round of inspiration. Somehow, a combination of Memphis, wavy, and three-dimensional concepts became the winner.
Above: brush pen sketches for handwritten typeface. Below: digitized characters in font-editing software Glyphs.
Left: inspiration by the style of the Memphis group, as well as typefaces with three-dimensional drop shadow features. Below: sketches further developing this concept, illustrating the patterns originally intended to fill the drop shadows.
The characters were then drawn with a Wacom Intuos inIllust rator. Futura Bold was used as a guide to ensure that the characters maintained consistent proportions. The fill colors used to differentiate between letters and shadows provided potential names and uses for the typeface — the pink and yellow reminded me of cake.
I continued to use “hamburger� as my control letters for the first process critique, at which point I had run into trouble finding the best way to merge the characters with their drop shadows for importing into Glyphs, resulting in the fills reversing.
Above: reversed fills in Glyphs due to vector merging errors (top), compared to the corrected and finalized characters (bottom).
For the first process critique, I also presented my control letters in several color combinations, as well as with an example of some of the Memphis patterns I was hoping to fill the drop shadows with. While Glyphs and the usable font file don’t allow for this customization, it is easily achievable by editing the vectors in the Illustrator file.
Left: comparisons of H and A in their color versions and their merged states for export (top), and their differences shown in outline mode in Illustrator (bottom).
Above: comparisons of the updated (left) and original (right) renderings of P in both their colored and merged states. Feedback from the process critique mentioned that the original P felt inconsistent and became too crowded inside the counter.
I chose Acid Sans as a name for the typeface for its psychedelic nature after considering many others, including Cake, Wavy, and Crinkle Cut, which came to play a role in the promotional booklet. Acid Sans is still a work in progress, and will soon include full punctuation, lowercase letters, and drop shadows on the remaining characters.
Left: Acid Sans in its current state of completion in Glyphs. Above: Images from the promotional booklet showcasing a variety of contexts for use.