Making of the FF Franziska font | Hacker News Reader

Making of the FF Franziska font

fffranziska.com

113 pointsadamnemecek17 comments

I have always viewed making of fonts as a art form with a tradition as long as written music. We take these fonts for granted, but it's amazing just how much consideration goes into these things. I have so much respect for talented designers like Jakob Runge. I think it's a rarity that someone has the design chops to know what he or she wants, execute the design on paper, be able to write hours of boring repetitive code in OpenType to get the kerning or ligatures just right, and then make sure that each cultural differences are properly accounted for...

As a musician, it's very inspiring when someone pours so much of their personality and time into crafting such masterpieces. Say what you will about the font, but it's coherent and shows you a complete aesthetic world of its own. Beethoven's symphonies may have taken longer to write, and it may have been more difficult, but the love I see from Runge into crafting something that at the end of the day can be replaced by Times New Roman, is amazing and frankly, comparable to Beethoven's.

So much respect.

This font, upon first review, appears to be of the very highest quality from a technical perspective. However, it doesn't initially appeal to me sylistically.

I would like to set a few projects with it to really get a feel for it and see if there are any issues.

I think that's fair for any new font. There's a reason why some fonts stand the test of time, like Garamond, and others don't. That's not to say that this font is not of the highest quality, which you've already mentioned.

Yes. Personally, I don't like the italic fonts. They remind of those vector fonts which came with Windows 3, which appeared to be drawn using lines. I think the v.15 italic looks better than the v.32 final version.

The serifs remind me a lot of Calluna by Jos Buivenga. They even use the same kind of drawings to defend this choice.

I was thinking the same thing. The dynamics feel very similar. Exljbris is one of the relatively few foundries I have bought from, actually, for the consistently high quality work across a variety of styles.

Great way to initiate people to the art of crafting a truly remarkable font. At this level, we're really talking about art... And I love the font - well done!

Unless I missed it in the article, I'd be curious to know how many hours / weeks / months it took from v1 to final version?

The attention to details presented in this article is amazing and inspiring. What really speaks to me is the timelapse of all the typeface versions in one .gif showing the progress. Now I want to make something similar for my products.

Wonderful attention to detail, and beautiful results. But i just can't use a font that has ragged numerals; they seem jarring and counterproductive. Much prefer fonts that have uniformity in the numeral glyphs. Most must disagree with me because oddly sized artistic numerals seems quite common in new fonts.

A lot of fonts these days come with 4 different styles of numerals/figures (http://fontfeed.com/archives/figuring-out-numerals/). Typographically each has its different uses: inline with lowercase letters you usually use proportional oldstlye figures, while tabular ones are reserved for numerical data like dollar amounts and things. If you dislike the default figure style of a typeface you should see if they have different ones available via OpenType features.

Actually, the “oddly sized” (“old-style”) numerals are most common in old typefaces, even more than in new ones (or more specifically, new professional typefaces typically include both). The uniform-height numerals are basically the “upper case” variants, which should typically only be used when typesetting numerals in the middle of text in all caps, tables of pure numbers, mathematical formulas, or the like.

When you have a paragraph of regular words, set in lower case, a “capitalized” number is very visually heavy and distracting, unbalancing the flow of the text.

At some point in the relatively recent past uniform-height numbers started to become the norm, I suspect largely because of typewriters and then early computers. (It hasn’t been until relatively recently (e.g. with OpenType) that software could easily set numerals in both the lowercase and uppercase versions. In the 90s, most high-quality commercial typefaces sold separate “pro” fonts which had small caps, old-style numerals, extra ligatures, etc., and the typesetter had to explicitly select the relevant characters and change the font to get those features, instead of just setting a feature flag for a whole text block.)

Is there empirical evidence that "capitalized" numbers are more difficult to read? I'm genuinely interested, but I do feel like a lot of typography is based on aesthetic assessments of individual glyphs, sentences, or blocks of text as opposed to studies of legibility.

"Tinker compared old-style and modern (lining) figures and found a non-significant advantage for old-style figures in terms of reading speed and error rate. (Oddly, modern lining figures were easier to read at a distance – on a billboard, for example. In other tests, capital letters were also found to be more legible than lowercase when set large and at a distance, so these findings do seem to agree."

From: "Taking it in – what makes type easy to read and why" [1] by Kathleen Tinkel, citing "Legibility of Print" by Miles Tinker, Iowa State University Press, 1963.

[1] http://www.uwosh.edu/faculty_staff/jager/typetinkel

Upvoting this for the beautiful storytelling of the true craftsman. However, FF Franziska definitely lacks Cyrillic glyphs.

I changed the original title "Making of FF Franziska" since it's not very descriptive.

I hate to be that guy, but if you care about descriptiveness the correct word would be "typeface", not "font".

I'd guess "font" is understood by more readers than "typeface", even if it is slightly incorrect.

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