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Comment by mpatane | Hacker News Reader

Hi everybody! Fabbrica designer here. If you have any question, or if you have any feedback, I would be super happy to hear.

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I love not only the aesthetic of this font, but the presentation of the rationale and ideas behind it.

Licensing is tricky, as others have already commented - I'd personally like to see a simple, affordable license for small biz.

Any chance of single-seat pricing? I would like to buy the font pack exclusively for personal use in editors on a work laptop, for myself only, on only one computer. It seems like the cheapest license is $50 for one font, 5 seats, and a limited amount product usage (not exactly sure what that is).

I understand if it's not practical to offer a smaller/cheaper license. This is the first set of fonts I've ever been interested in paying money for, so great job!

Hello, I'm glad you like the font. Would you DM me so I can come back to you? You can find my contact at cinetype.com .

Quick answer about the product usage: the font can be embedded in a limited amount of products (defined in the License chosen). Products can be, for example, apps, softwares, video games, ebooks, dashboards, mobile devices.

Hi! Are there any monospace fonts which go well with this? I found JetBrains Mono to be a good choice: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/

I'm not the OP but I think IBM Plex Mono would be good companion for this typeface.

I found the argument about balance within individual characters interesting: the direction of stems and the white space between them. As an example, N is shown. However, I it feels top heavy to me, almost unstable - which is not something I expected for a utilitarian font. Any comment on that design choice?

You are definitely right. The slightly, almost out-of-balance feeling is an integral part of the design. The white areas within letters are not of equal weight, and this creates the internal dynamism that I’m referring to. B is a good example. The lower mass of white is bigger than the upper one and this gives the feeling that is pushing upwards, while the upper mass of white is contrasting it. There is not a perfect equilibrium between the two areas, and this creates a tension that I was looking for.The overall stems construction holds in place the two forces.I still find the font utilitarian in its nature. It is quite easy to use, and flexible; I would define it as a workhorse, but with its personality. Its features become more relevant at bigger sizes, but they are toned down enough to work well at smaller sizes. I have to say that possibly the N is one of the more border-line cases, and I’m considering keeping the more traditional one as default, and use this as stylistic alternate. It’s been a while since I’m thinking about it, and some comments here confirm it might be a good idea.

B definitely triggered the OCD in me for it to be symmetric. The rest of the font looked so balanced and the B kept screaming to me for help

If you look at B in most fonts: it is not meant to be symmetric. The bottom is usually heavier, providing stability, on which the top sits. The bottom also needs to align somewhat with the x-height of lowercase characters to not look out of place - hence be taller than the upper half. Pure symmetry is not the correct measure in fonts.

Personal questions:

What initially attracted you to crafting typefaces? And what continues to fuel your attraction to this specific area of design?

Uh! This is a good question. I studied Graphic design & Visual communication, and I wanted to work on film titles for my final dissertation, a topic that I’m particularly fond of. Of course, typography is one of the key ingredients of a film title, so I’ve started to study type and typography, and I basically never stopped. After several books, I pivoted and focused exclusively on typefaces. My final dissertation became designing a typeface for film subtitles (still hanging around cinema but from another perspective : ).

I guess today I’m still doing this for three primary reasons:

– It allows me to discover and learn new things daily. Letters are everywhere and with so many forms and functions that I won’t get never bored and as society and culture develops, so design does, including type design.

– It gives me full control of the design and production processes; I can make a typeface from the first sketches to the final delivery with no need of a print-shop, or a factory, or anything else. This also means that I’m fully responsible of all the problems you will see in my typefaces. But it’s ok, I like to be accountable for what I do : )

– It is a sort of monastic, iper-focused specialty that requires a lot of attention and discipline, and somehow fits pretty well with my designer persona. I find it to be a pretty zen activity.

What are the tools and how did you get started? I'm a typography enthusiast and digital designer myself, but the intricacies of creating fonts has always eluded me.

Started with FontLab around 2003. Nowadays, my primary tool for development is Glyphs. It’s very easy to use, it’s pretty quick to learn how to use it, and it has quite an active forum/community open to help. Also, you can find plenty of tutorial around. Production wise, apart Glyphs, I use OTMaster quite a lot, fontmake and fonttools (these two are command line tools). VTT (Visual TrueType) for hinting.

My first experiments with fonts were pure trash, bad under many respects. Either super modular and stiff, or completely unaware of letterform construction (how the weight distribution works, proportions, etc.). Most useful thing for myself is to have a brief in mind and to give a sense to the shapes I draw.

I would study letterform, trying to reverse-engineer the design, looking at patterns within each letter but also among the whole alphabet. For example, how the shape of the curves is implemented across the glyph set (if you go for squarish curves, you would expect to get a similar personality wherever you have a curve).Feel free to drop me a line if you need more advice. There are also few good books that can help to focus on the important bits of letterforms construction.

I really like this! It has a wonderful balance of strength and warmth. Small question: the lower left part of the bowl on lower case b seems to get a bit thin. At least on my phone it almost looks like there is a missing pixel. Is this something you've looked at?

Thanks a lot. The balance between strength and warmth is really something that I think identifies the typeface.

I haven’t noticed anything in the lowercase ‘b’, but I’m running further rasterisation tests as we speak, and I’ll push out an update that hopefully addresses the issue. Thanks a lot for the feedback. Much appreciated.

Love the writeup, which had the inadvertent side effect of sending me shopping for DIN, in which the letter tails use less % of letter shape. For me it’s faster reading while just as (more?) industrial. Thanks for your work, and for showing DIN 2014!

The "N" is too distracting. It makes me always look twice to see if is I+Y.

Totally agree. It looks like there's an alternate version available via OpenType, which is much more traditional.

I'm floored by how good this looks! I'd buy a license if it wasn't so restrictive (as others have mentioned).

I love the balance you struck between "rationality" and "warmth". Fabbrica is beautiful!

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