Picking up where I left off, the Rosslyn font was originally designed using Fontstruct. Each letter was designed to fit into a square, so letter height and width are equal. Additionally, I used a 45 degree slant in some letters, like A and W most notably. I took that template, and aimed to take it one step further, and reproduce it using only geometric expressions in the Processing programming language.
Rosslyn is immediately inspired by Gotham by Tobias Frere-Jones. Frere-Jones was inspired by the font used in architectual signage. In this video, he discusses how it looked not like a font by a type designer, but that of an engineer. This week's project is an attempt to emulate that aesthetic.
A, K, M, V, W, Y all use 45 degree angles. If you peered into the math, you'd see a lot of root-2. Like any pupil of Euclid, I find these ratios sublime. The caps of C and G are also set to 45 degrees. R, X, Z, use the same angle, which is dependent on the line width. The angle in N is the same angle, just rotated 90 degrees—the N and Z are the same shape. The circle in C, G, O are the same size. The outside radius is equal to half the length of the outlying square. B, P, R have the same size semi-circle.
Once I started this project, I knew I would have to eventually face my old foe, the S curve. The version you see right now doesn't have any of the special geometric whizzy-ness-itude I played around with a couple months ago. But I did turnover some of the lessons learned in that experiment. The current version you now see is comprised of two arcs, fit inside the square. This is kind of ugly, since After some conderation, I've decided that its more important to preserve the circles than to make the letter fit inside the square. My next version should have this fix.
Source code: rosslyn03b. Built with Processing
Use slider to adjust stroke width