Behind The Scenes: Creating My Own Original Font!

Hey guys, it's been a while, huh?

-By a while just a few days wow I'm very productive when it's school prompting me to do stuff-

For this post, I am going to write about how I conceive a certain type of font that I created for my Design Principles class.

My very first design is called 'Vampire's Masquerade'. Why don't you take a look at the prototype designs here?

Edgy but has classic vampirism was what I was aiming.

Now, the reason why I call it 'Vampire's Masquerade' is because the source of inspiration of this font  is the PC video game 'Vampire: The Masquerades: Bloodlines", which is an open-world RPG [Role-Playing Game]  video game where you get to choose to play as a newly embraced kindred a.k.a vampire  who belongs to a certain vampire clan, and each of these clans will grant you with certain specific abilities. Yes, this sounds completely dorky, but no, really. It makes vampires sexy but not tacky, is very, very well-written -especially if you play as a Malkavian vampire, as the insanity of a Malkavian grants players a wonderfully diversed and humorously tiltillating dialogue options -, and is also a hell lot of fun to just play.

But then I realized there were a lot of dead ends I encountered as I was developing this font. Too many, even. The most exemplary of them all is the fact that basically my 'A' for this lineup is probably the best AND the only good thing for this set, but the rest of the alphabets are...

Downight mediocre. Let me cry forever for a moment.

Jeanette, my favorite vamp can you not hurt me this way.

My heart will always be with the game, but after a lot of thinking I realized that my font is just terrible at representing my love and pride of this masterpiece of an RPG. And so I decided to replace the concept with a brand new concept.

So, one day I was walking to my college listening to music, and then this played.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoiCynccqWY


And in an instant, I saw the light. The light, that the Dangan Ronpa series brought upon me.

Dangan Ronpa is an absurdly funky murder mystery PSP game, where fifteen freshly placed high school students where only geniuses of various areas are gathered together are locked shut in a mysterious school building after they all fell asleep upon entering their original school building  and will suffer from being trapped there forever... Or won't they?

A student CAN get out, BUT if said student KILLS another student and manages to fool everybody else that he or she is not the culprit in classroom trials held by an incredibly creepy and perky Monokuma, a monochromatic bear robot thing. If the culprit fails to escape being pinpointed as the murderer, he or she will be executed in a demonstration of a heinous and painfully tailored execution.

There's your ominous monochromatic bear bastard.

The game's plot's pretty good, the characters are very interesting, but it doesn't really touch me deeply. It's really enjoyable though, and I find that it would be nice for me to take some artistic sources of ideas from the whole concept of the video game.

So to say, I was inspired to design a new font line /do you mean clothing line no hah/ and named this set 'Trigger Havoc', inspired by the subtitle of the upcoming english port of the game: "Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc'. Have a look, and feel free to comment on how 'sore wa chigau' ( literally "THAT IS WRONG", often paraphrased in the english fan translation as  "YOU GOT THAT WRONG!" ) the whole thing is.

Fonts. Fonts. Design Principles. Fonts.

Hey everyone! I know I haven't been posting anything for ages because I have thousands of other stuff and interests to tend to. So I'm back to share about fonts. Three fonts I absolutely love and three more that I absolutely... Don't... Really like from Dafont.com. Well, not really loathe, I can't see anything but baby eaters as evil, but I have to. For this is my fate.

Top 3 Awesome

Pancake

Just look at this cutie patootie. It is simple, yet undoubtedly stylish and can be used very flexibly. Not just a pretty face, this sweet treat is also able to be used to reperesent practically almost every other typable symbol on your keyboard on screen!

Orange Juice

This is definitely my type of font. Artsy, yet still manages to pass as an easily-deciphered font. It's something that you can use for a lot of projects, and can be used for both commercial and purely aesthetic, artistic purposes. It also has every available and conceivable key on your keyboard as well! Well, what a treat, I must say!

A Song For Jennifer

Yet another favorite of mine. It's again, artsy yet is very practical. Perhaps this may be a personal preference but I do absolutely favor these types of fonts. My reasons are quite similar with the 'Orange Juice' font, and let's just say I just fell in love on first sight. It is also able to present every single type of symbol present on your keyboard onscreen and so this magnificent font has waltzed in to my heart.

There's also a bold version, and my from cute to angsty, what a transition. This adds more to its usability so I highly recommend having this font permanently installed in your computers.

Top 3... Not So Awesome

Los Santos
One of the reasons why I dislike this certain font is because some letters are so similar to other letters. Here's a sample:

Firstly, this is supposed to be read as 'LOS SANTOS.'

Unfortunately, the T looks preeety similar to an E. So I thought it was 'LOS SANEOS'- Lost sane o's pfft-  Which hinders readability and will lead to a very different conclusion and add unnecessary confusion. A good font must always be nice on the eyes AND not deceive its readers. Because betrayals hurt. Also, the weight of the font are all over the place.

  Aaaaand I'm pretty sure you'll get screwed up by this very 2-ish looking Z.

The design doesn't really appeal to the eyes as well. It has the looks of a tattoo font but if you try to use it for something else... Well, it's not very versatile. But after I think about it, now the naming choice makes perfect sense.

Swirly Shirley

This one would've made a much prettier font if there are less swirls distracting us from the main reason why fonts are invented: To be read and understood. Yes, Shirley, we know you love your swirlies, but I think we have a bit of an obsessiveness here. There are just so many of them, your eyes will instantly by drawn to those hypnotizing loops all over the place.
And apparently you can only type alphabets with this font, so it's not really all-around functional either.

BadPad Distressed

First of all, I can see why it's named this way. It's born this way. I have no idea why but I actually feel rather anxious reading using this font. It's really blurry, probably to recreate a distressed -duh- impact, but it also compromises the professional element that an awesome font should have. It may be designed for, say, a gaming poster in mind from what I can gather, but it's so blurry that I believe it'll lose some legibility against a background. It just destoys its own reason of existence, this font. My deepest condolensces.