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Designed for extreme sports brand Jackrabbitt, this is Split's first full typeface design and is part of an ongoing project to create the visual identity for the community-focused brand.
Starting life as just the word "jackrabbitt" in the logo, we decided to take a leap into the unknown and extend the design into a full working font that the JR guys could use as a display face on their website, videos, apparel etc.
The original letter-forms were designed to be both friendly and accessible but at the same time have a bit of attitude and edge. After a number of versions and a bit of trial and error in the rules of type design we settled on a basic design we were happy with. Then came the hard work of actually making it work as a type face, which is certainly more complicated than we anticipated – with literally thousands of possible combinations of letters that needed kerning* individually the project admittedly became a labour of love for a while. However, I'm happy to say it led to the creation of our very first font as well as a whole new level of appreciation for the work of type designers!
*Kerning involves setting the spacing between each pair of letters and is crucial to making a typeface read correctly.
So we had a bit or response on Twitter to this one – thought I'd post up one tweeters comments that were pretty useful:
ReplyDelete---
@thejackamo:
curious—did you actually kern a load of letter pairs, or did you go in beforehand and really hone in the overall metrics?
@splitUK:
Started kerning individual pairs, but as I went on looked back much more at overall metrics and setting kerning classes
...Ended up scraping much of the initial work & starting over- Steep learning curve! Looking forward to #2 now I know a bit more
@thejackamo:
Next time 'round have a look into using control chains from the start—kerning should be a final step :) http://twitpic.com/8gnizu
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Having set the overall metrics for the font, I'd started off kerning every pair of letters individually, though as I got more used to the capabilities of Font Lab Studio I found that its was much more effecient looking at the metrics and using kerning classes. (So kerning the pair o & l for example, these settings would then apply to o & b, o & f, o & h etc – the rule being a rounded left hand letter followed by a straight stem)
However, control chains I hadn't used, and turns out this could have made life much easier, as detailed by the link in @thejackamo's final tweet.
I woke up this morning to find a good few of comments about this post on my twitter so thought I'd share a few. These are all thanks to the re-tweet by @typedirectors:
ReplyDelete@JamesToddDesign:
Nice start! z and o seem a bit too dark. Also try to rely on spacing and use as little kerning as possible.
@Dunwich_Type:
too many ideas: http://spiekermann.com/en/rotis
@helloimfran:
Oh how lovely! I love the cut on the ends (such as the r, e, a, c...etc) But no #ampersand?
@tweetbruno:
The Asterix is a little thin. This face does ooze snowboarding!
...Compare the c and e and h and n/m. See how the curves work differently?
...What about something more like this for comma and quotation marks. http://yfrog.com/nzujcp
@GGrasmoen:
Razor-sharp & readable. Weights? Ligatures? Open font? Thanks!
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So there's some nice things said, and some good constructive criticism made – top of the todo list is to make a few amends, such as sorting out the asterisk, adding an ampersand and going back and addressing the kerning issue... and then the task of creating the uppercase.
In terms of some of the points made thought I'd put down a couple of thoughts too:
Whilst I think @tweetbruno's suggestion is cool, the commas, speech marks and semi colons are all deliberately rounded and a tiny bit oversized to give the face a friendly, fun vibe – the whole design was a balance between the edgy and cool and the friendly to reflect the JR brand and after quite a bit of consultation with the client we felt we struck the right balance.
However, this is perhaps one of the reasons for @Dunwich_Type's vaild point that there is a little too much going on. However, with this being our first attempt combined with trying to create a face that both reflected the brand's personality and was recognisable and distinct then this was probably inevitable! I would say this is designed only as a display face but looking at @Duntwich_Type's work (www.dunwichtype.com) there's clearly plenty of lessons to be learned yet!
With thanks to @typedirectors and their followers for all thier input.