Free Font: Norwester | Hacker News Reader

Free Font: Norwester

jamiewilson.io

252 pointsbenoitg59 comments

Hey everybody. I'm the designer of Norwester. Thanks for the interest and feedback. Yea, the font is really limited right now. Please use it judiciously as there are a lot of glyphs not accounted for, as digitalengineer pointed out. Please let me know if you have any special requests or catch any thing not looking right. Thanks again!

Nice piece of work. Can we know how you made 'em? Which tools did you use, steps that you followed? Can people fork it and add those missing glyphs to make it complete?

Thanks. I used a combination of Glyphs (http://www.glyphsapp.com/) and Illustrator, and of course some sketching. This was originally just a custom wordmark for a side project and then I decided to just keep expanding to the rest of the alphabet. I definitely plan on putting all the source code on Github for people to contribute to. That would be awesome.

Peanut gallery comment here, on what is a really handsome font. On the S, the angularity at the two ends of the middle stroke seems at odds with the larger radii almost everywhere else. The slant of the stroke stands out in a pleasing way, but the corners are jarring. I wonder if rounder corners would preserve the first effect while mitigating the second. I suppose 2 and 5 would have to be reworked a bit if you go down this road.

Hi, I interviewed Jos (the designer turned typographer from the link inside the other tread) once. Ran it through Google Translate, perhaps you'll find it usefull: http://translate.google.nl/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A...

cool. thanks for the link.

Is the name a play on the storm type of a nor'easter?

I was wondering if he was a New Zealander, in Canterbury we have a very characterful foehn wind we call the nor'wester. Its associated arch of cloud is called the nor'west arch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nor'west_arch

We're not exactly imaginative with names around here.

Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

The website shows 93 glyphs but I get 96 in when I load it in Illustrator. It seems like there is duplicate closing single and double quote marks, then there is a blank glyph too.

The degree symbol is not showing up. I feel like the @ symbol doesn't mesh with the rest of the font, maybe make it more rounded/disjointed and continuous where the inner swirl is.

One of my long term projects is a brand with a weather symbol (fog) being incorporated so I kind of got my hopes up for that at first, but this is easy enough to make my own really.

Thanks for the heads up on those issues. I'll take a look at what's going on there. This is my first font so I'm still new this troubleshooting stuff. Thanks for your feedback!

Here are some possible improvements that jumped out at me:

- Certain letters including C, D, and S appear shorter than other letters, because of their round tops. Optical illusions cause letterforms with round edges (C, O, S) or pointed edges (A, V, W) to need to extend slightly farther in the rounded/pointed direction to appear to be the same size as other straighter shapes. This is called “overshoot” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_%28typography%29).

- The spacing and kerning both need work. Letter pairs such as OV, FR, IA, AI, KE, EY, OX, MY, AP, and RT are too far apart. I’ve found that it’s easier to kern if you look at your outlines upside-down and backwards (I know Fontlab Studio has a built-in option to preview text in this manner, Glyphs might as well). Doing so helps your brain regard the outlines purely as shapes without getting sidetracked by their semiotic significance.

Another trick to type design is understanding that mathematical/geometric precision do not always result in the appearance of mathematical/geometric precision. Measurements that should theoretically be equal (such as the heights of letters as previously mentioned) often need to be fudged in order to look equal to the imperfect human eye.

The forums at Typophile are a great place to have your work critiqued by professional type designers (http://typophile.com/forum/1). Or, feel free to contact me if any of this is interesting and you want to know more. :)

Very helpful. Thank you very much. I'll keep tweaking the kerning and consider those optical adjustments moving forward.

The flipping horizontally & vertically hint is ridiculously awesome, and works for just about any design or artwork.

Anything that requires composition can be improved by flipping the work one way or another. Lots of digital artists use this all the time to check anatomy too.

Request: Å, Ä, Ö

Great job. I saw this font on Designer News yesterday and downloaded it instantly.

I think creating a font from scratch could become a designer's rite of passage. It involves usability, aesthetics, and technical knowledge (kerning, weights, character encoding, horizontal and vertical metrics...). I always thought about creating one myself but usually ended up browsing the web for original and better designed fonts.

You got me questioning my behavior.

Possibly, but graphic design and type design are vastly different fields. A good graphic designer isn't necessarily a good type designer.

Indeed. A good visual designer should know how to take a typeface apart, but you really need to become a type designer to put one together.

While this is true, type design will make you a better graphic designer. Designing a font is one of the better ways of training your eyes, becoming sensitive to subtlety, trusting your optical perception over raw measurements, learning about the interaction between shapes and space, etc.

Thank you for putting the license in the zipfile. We've had to avoid using certain fonts because it wasn't possible to identify the license.

Can you please put another file with a link back to your website and the request to donate to the International Justice Mission if used?

Ahh, lawyers destroying business opportunities since forever

Looks nice. It's Open Type so thats cool. However, no serious designer would choose this font for production as it is right now though. You dev's would call it 'Aplha' or 'Beta'. It contains only the 'Western' letters and even for that, not most variables. This makes it dangerous to use for your company's branding. Imagine if you want to write an é, ü, î or what not. You can not. So, nice to try a bit but be careful using it for production.

If you wish to compare it to something, have a look at these free fonts: http://www.exljbris.com/ They're free for the Roman, Bold, Heavy, Italic and small caps, but if you want more variables, say a Heavy Italic you pay a small fee.

Yea this font wouldn't work in scandinavia either.

I like the font but it needs more symbols to be useful.

Scandinavia needs ÄÖ and ÆØÅ. Accented characters would also be nice.

How would you make it better? At the end of the page the author acknowledges the need for help in making the font better. I know nothing about making fonts, but you clearly have some ideas.

So, what needs to be added before a professional designer would consider this font?

Idon't mean to say this is not good, but as it is now it's not complete. A lot of the glyphs (characters) are missing. I'm not talking about ff or other combinations that can be replaced by a specific glyph for typographical purity, or non-western letters (Central European, Russian, Turkish, Chines...) but rather the extra's even our own Latin based fonts need.

I don't know, I think it'd be a nice brand logo but for the reasons you've gone into a poor choice for all type. It would certainly make a good 'impact' font for a header area.

This font will be great to use in headlines. Will this font be available in Google Fonts [1]? Because Google hosts many fonts under SIL Open Font License .

[1] http://www.google.com/fonts

Just to be clear: I submitted this but I'm not related to the OP. I just found it on http://sidebar.io/ earlier today and liked both the open license and the fact that the author seems open to suggestions.

There's something really weird going on with http://sidebar.io/new. When using Disconnect [1] in Firefox, it blocks over 1000 requests to Twitter and just keeps growing, as if Sidebar makes a new request every time Disconnect blocks it. Whatever is going on it causes Firefox to lock up repeatedly.

[1] https://disconnect.me/

Thanks for sharing my font! you're awesome.

You're most welcome! I was, in fact, surprised nobody had submitted it. I love what you've done here and hope you'll be able to push it forward. If I had one request, it would be french diacritical marks, but I will definitely find uses for the font as-is.

Thanks for the hard work!

It's a pity this font can't be used in many countries due to lack of any diacritics... :(

There's also the broader problem of just writing people's names. :/

Sorry for the lack of those glyphs. I really hope to expand it soon to make it more useful. Thanks for the interest though.

thanks! looking forward to the expanded version! (i know providing diacritics is not an easy thing to do...)

I love the fact that you've asked people to donate to the International Justice Mission - they do great work! What made you choose them? Is the font somehow inspired by the work they do? (maybe you could convince them to incorporate it into a rebrand ;)!

What license is this released under?

Found in the zip file:

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is copied below, and is also available with a FAQ at: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL

Ah! Thank you - I should have opened the file first.

Fantastic. I just wish more fonts used a slash zero :(

Looks a lot like "Bank Gothic". I almost expect to see it on a refrigerator... (S M E G)

Wow, an ASCII font. Useless in most part of the world (sorry for being dismissive. I actually like the font, but without any "funny" characters, it's use is very limited) Now, I'll probably get all the downvotes from today...

well it doesn't have lowercase either

Lowercase is small caps.

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends."

Anton Ego, Ratatouille

Sure, it's limited to the projects that don't need non-ASCII characters. If you need non-ASCII characters, you can pay the designer to make them.

Why did you use images of the font on your demo page (rather than using it as a web font)?

Very nice looking, thank you!

I love it. It has that cold war propaganda feel to it. Great for headlines.

The "R" and "5" are quite interesting, and the symbols look fun, specially that "@".

is this font legit? it looks like it was build based on some other font, and there are still original/unchanged characters left. f.e. try to render A, Á and notice the difference in font-weight and also the char differences. or am i missing something?

The font doesn't have those characters yet, so your system is likely defaulting to another font.

thats interesting. i didn't know that there might be a fallback for individual character. not recognised characters are usually visibly marked as not present (square or X or something else). but if this is whats happening, its not falling back to the next font set in css, its rather picking some "other" (what are the rules here?) font. or simply these characters are designed like this in the font. either as leftovers of originally edited font or on purpose.

> it looks like it was build based on some other font, and there are still original/unchanged characters left.

There is nothing wrong with doing that. Fonts can't be copyrighted.

The font file itself can (sometimes) be copyrighted as a form of computer program, but not the font (i.e. the shape).

>Fonts can't be copyrighted are you sure? than what are all this online web-font services like typekit about? are you saying that i can download any font, edit its metadata, maybe add 1 point to every character and freely use it?

> than what are all this online web-font services like typekit about?

Good question. They are maintaining the fiction that the font can be copyrighted and hope that everyone plays along. Keep in mind the font file itself is copyrighted because font files are actually little computer programs.

> are you saying that i can download any font, edit its metadata, maybe add 1 point to every character and freely use it?

Probably not, that's not a sufficient change of the file. What you can do is display the rendered font on your screen, then exactly copy it using a font editor. You will loose hinting this way though (the program embedded in the font to make the hints is copyrighted, the specific hints at each size is not), so there is some extra work you will need to do to replicate the hinting.

Please, use the word typeface when trying to make this distinction. In the US, typefaces cannot be copyrighted, but some fonts can.

That's an incorrect distinction. The font (i.e. a particular size and weight of a typeface) can not be copyrighted. Only the computer file can.

Boxy! Downloaded it to play around, thx.

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