Practical application of the fonts (6)

Publishing house Ginkgo from Leyden, The Netherlands, just came out with a book called "Kijken naar Gebouwen", translated "Looking at Buildings". A great overview of the architecture in the southern part of Amsterdam. My font Mokum Tooneel was chosen as the font for the cover. And yes, I am pleased and honored.


Opening the book I got a nice surprise in the form of an architectural drawing for the Amsterdam Lyceum, a school that was built between 1918 and 1920. The architect was H.A.J. Baanders. The lettering on the drawing is - in my opinion - awesome, and the next project is to reconstruct and digitize it.


Further information about the activities of Ginkgo Publishers may be found on their website.

Practical application of the fonts (5)

Several times a week I pass the city of Gouda by train. Near the railroad tracks is a wonderful building, called De Kade. It used to be a school, but now it is being rebuilt to house a medical facility. The building was done in Amsterdamse School style, and guess what font is used now?


Yes, it is Mokum Stad. And yes I feel flattered! This is, after all, the reason I recreate the old fonts. Sometimes in the near future I will visit the building to take some more pictures. The picture above was made when the building was just finished, in 1930.

Agony!

Wandering through Amsterdam I saw this beauty. A (presumably concrete) letterbox, with an awesome font.



This litteraly screams to have a complete alphabet fashioned around it, but I can sense problems around the corner. The word POST was clearly constructed to fit in this combination and not another. The kerning between the O and S is great, but it destroyes the S for other purposes. Try to imagine the combination TS without tweaking the shape of the S.
You can see I have a small problem here.

Descending Upper Case...

An interesting idea, not to let upper case and lower case share the same baseline. Just let them hang from the same "clothesline", so to speak, and you get:



This looks promising, although there are still some quirks. For instance *is* is a good idea to let some upper case characters peek above the x-height? Or should the whole uppercase set dive even lower, like the S in the original lettering on the entrance in Zuidlaren? I have to bear in mind that people will actually use this font so the deviations from the norm cannot be too big. I'll do some puzzling over the weekend.

Update #1:
First result of the puzzling. This image is stored as a GIF-file, so there aro no JPG artifacts that could spoil the image (like the one above):



Update #2:
I did not quite like the letter Q, so I changed the design. Borrowing some elements from the R gives a much more pleasing image. Judge for yourself:



Update #3:
This follows a suggestion made by Bill, to omit the 'serif' on top of the E and F. You may also call it a flagstaff, and the initial idea was to create more height in the upper case.