I Made a Font!
The story
I’ve always been kind of a type enthusiast, and naturally I dream about making a typeface myself. So when Letterform Archive here in SF opened an online introductory type design course last summer, I snatched the opportunity and signed up. It was hella fun, and hella grind. I would start working on the font after I get off work and not stop until midnight. Kind of addicting, honestly—seeing a font steadily taking shape, and stare at the beautiful letters and think “I made it”.
The instructor Kel and ta Josh are so nice and supportive, and they definitely knows their sh..tuff. The classmates are all so cool and creative. It’s so fun to get to know artists, when you interact with mostly engineers everyday. One of the classmates, Brian, actually started doing type: Fusion Type!
When the course ended I finished the lower and upper case, lining and oldstyle numbers, some symbols and basic diacritics. After the course I didn’t touch it for a few weeks, then added some more symbols and started to add a bold. But eventually the progress almost stalled. I’ve finished the bold for all the letters but couldn’t get myself to finish the bold for all those numbers and symbols, and fix kerning for everything. Doubt also starts creeping in—looking at those beautiful and polished typefaces like William, Clifford, Fern, my font looks more and more like a nervous splotchy mess that doesn’t know what it wants to be. By the end of 2024, I almost give up finishing it.
Fast forward to a few days ago, I was reading a newsletter in my mail client, and noticed that the font looks so pretty! I’ve set the default font of my mail client to my font (so I can catch errors and tweak the font in a real setting), but it looked so good that I thought it’s using some other font that the newsletter brought itself. I had to zoom in and look at the letters back and forth before certain that it’s using my font. That encouraged me so much, and I thought I’ll do the “get a garbage out first” strat and just finish it real quick, not dwell on anything, just skip it if I can’t make something work.
It’s been a week, I finished bold for numbers and all the symbols, more-or-less copy-pasted kerning from regular to bold, and added smallcaps using font remix tools. It’s finally ready to be used on my blog! Though definitely not ready for anybody else to use. I haven’t even asked anybody to review the bold for me, because I don’t think it’s presentable for review right now.
The font
I call this font Boritina, because people seems to name fonts something-tina a lot, and I want to make a boring body text.
Boritina is basically a mixture of all the features I like for a body text. Before Boritina, I was using Martina Plantijn for this blog. It’s clean as crystal, and has the color I like, but I can envision something that has a bit more flair like a classic Venetian typeface—the slanted bar of e, the longer stems, the extended tail of Q, the warmer feeling, the dagger, etc. On the other hand, old Venetian often are too thin and delicate, and a x-height as low as classic Venetian’s is a bit inconvenient for modern settings. I want the robustness of Plantin, and other modern features so the font doesn’t look out-of-place even for a technical blog like this one.
I stole the skeleton from Jenson’s roman, but relaxed the aperture and shortened the x-height. I maintained a low contrast, and kept a tiny bit of remnant of pen strokes, to capture that humane warmth, while not appearing too old. The curves are largely very simplistic, but I added a tiny bit of personality in the bowl of B, R, and D, and in the serif of G and S. So when you look up close, it’s not completely boring. R, Q, J all have very extended tails, which I like; together with the wider capitals, they make the font spacious and extended and comfortable—some of the “workhorse” body text typefaces tends to have very short descenders and cramped tails and feet, which I sometimes find a bit uncomfortable. In this day and age, page count isn’t an issue anymore, so I say we deserve some more room.
Another guardrail—or limitation, depends on how you see it—that I set for myself is to make the counterspace as pretty as the strokes are. If you look at the inside of h, n, m, the triangles of x, v, y, w, the bowl of b, p, q, d, or inside and around the capitals, they are pretty shapes.
To see the font in action, well, you’ve been seeing it in action, since this blog now uses Boritina (it still uses Margina Plantijn for italics). I might make a specimen/showcase page for Boritina later.