Inspiration from Zuidlaren

Zuidlaren is a nice village in the woods just south of Groningen. Driving through the village my eye caught a glimpse of a truly impressive building. A little further down the road I saw the entrance:



The strongly kerned pair OO draws the attention immediately and the other characters are also promising. A new font is in the making. The genius behind all this was architect Egbert Reitsma, who drew the plans for this sanatorium around 1928. To get a better view of the letters, here is a compilation in close-up:



The text was made from forged iron or steel, using a continuous strip for each character. With the exception of the letter T, that was made by welding to pieces together. Whether this will survive in the ultimate font, I don't know yet. Have to do some testing, possibly altering the vertical position of the different elements.

A better look at Esserveld

I decided to go and see this cemetary myself. Pictures found on the internet are nice, but they do not show everything. So my wife and I went to Groningen (in the pouring rain) to take some new pictures of the entrance gate:


And guess what? The characters are truly 3D, with a rounded bevel and cutouts that look as if they were made by a chisel in stead of a saw. This means I will have to rethink the base of the font. In other words: back to the drawingboard.

News from Esserveld

The holiday season proved benificial for my new font. I talked a lot, made sketches and waited for some "brainwaves" and all that resulted in a partially overhauled font:



The X, Y and Z are still problem children, and the same is true for the O and Q. The K seems promising, but it's not quite what I want. The H could use an ellipse, probably on the right side. I'll tinker with that. As always: if you have a comment, don't hesitate to share it with me.

Help is much appreciated

I'm keeping my focus on the northern part of The Netherlands for a while, getting inspiration from all the fascinating buildings over there. One that caught my eye was the Esserveld cemetery, of which I present this picture of the entrance building:



Notice the lettering that was used for the name. This just HAS to be transformed into a font. First impression: "Hey, piece of cake, I'll do that in a couple of hours..."
Yeah! But then the second impression: "Whoa! This is really complicated", followed after a short while by impression number three: "Gosh, what did I do? How do I get out of this trap?"
First thing I did was recreate the E, S, R, V, L and D, with a little tweaking, like the stem of the R. Then, the rest of the uppercase set was made, as can be seen here:



And this is where the public comes in (I hope). Please let me know which of the letters you find the 'odd ones out'. I have some ideas myself, but in order not to influence anyone I keep my mouth shut for the time being. Please put a comment underneath.