Yeah, there'll be a few of these going
forwards too; it's my Blog! We’re back to early ideas of mine which were fleshed-out when I got
stuck into CAD, but this one goes back to my childhood, or - at least - teenage flirtations with design,
and my attempt at an alphabet or font I originally called 'Fatabet', pronounced
fat-a-bet, for obvious reasons!
The pages of my old sketch-book from
collage, back in 1981-3, and my attempts to design an alphabet in which all the
letters were contained within a circle; I think there were a couple in the
1970's; Lettraset did one with
smiley-faced suns I think, but despite having both Lettraset and Mechaorama
catalogues, I didn't crib from them (if they come out of storage I'll compare
the closest, but they may have been lost in a flood back in 2007?), and sort of
gave-up when I couldn't solve a couple of letters, the 'B' was one and the 'D' which still
niggles!
However, CAD was an obvious opportunity to
have another stab at the old idea, and I quickly got some geometric rules
established and started playing around with the harder letters and some
punctuation. You can see that 'B' (and 'D') along with 'Q' are coming out of
the circle and I'm still not 100% happy with the first 2, the 'Q' however
works, as it's already an odd-one!
I quickly used it for my signature block on
all my drawing files/print-outs, and started thinking about other treatments;
most fonts have a bold and italic version, so in playing-around I've ended up
with several potentials!
And yes, the Fatabet got renamed Slimfont,
although I know I could never use Fatboyslim, or Slimshady commercially,
or not without passing many pieces of silver to two guys who probably have enough
already!
Slimshady actually gave me the ultimate version (see below), while
I don't think I named the one bottom-left, which ought to be Slim
Outline but I already used Slimout for the standard font, so
maybe Slim Jazzy?
Here we see CAD'ed versions of Slimwall
(greenish) and Fatboyslim (multicoloured), which - latter - gave me the idea
for a Christmas card I think I posted here at the time - 2012? With a
construction stage at bottom left, before I'd positioned the light-source for
the shadows, and at bottom right, my prepared design doubled for printing on A3
card-stock.
Which is here again! Well, it's only about
six weeks away now! You use a single 'light' so the lines from the shadows,
followed-back through the letters, all go to a single vanishing-point to
enhance the 3D effect of the letters floating over the 'card' on the card!
And no matter how bad the year's been I
hope over the next few weeks, your Christmas this year shapes up to be better
than the last two - it can't just keep getting worse . . . can it?
Some other stuff, even in the digital age,
it seems a lot of paper still finds its way into the project folder, not all of
it explainable, but clearly I've started tackling the numbers and looking at
font-size or kerning (ratios of gaps between certain pairs of adjacent letters)
or something!??
I don't think I ever progressed beyond the
numerals you can see here (left) or have even got to choosing a final from some
of those where there are alternatives shown, but I was doing it in college-time
and had other stuff to get on with.
Once I had a near finished alphabet (right)
I moved on to other things and haven't got much further, I tweak something from
time to time, but time's short these days, although I hope one day to put a finished
version on a free-site like DAFonts.
One change you may have noticed is that the
parallel line 'rule' established by the original 'A' and 'B' from my teenage
version, which was carried on with the 'C', 'E' and 'F' (still not happy with
'D'!) and then taken through the whole alphabet, has now been dropped for 'W' following the enforced 'angle rule' for 'X' and 'Y', which I think makes it much better, the 'W' isn't just an upside down 'M', but a new letter
in its own right!
Indeed you wonder if the reason all those
angled letters are all at the back-end of the alphabet ('Z' is another) might be because when they were codifying it (monks? a Caesar?), they'd run out
of strait and curved shapes/combinations which were suitably different from
each other!
But back to Slimshady . . . once I
was 3D CAD'ing more complicated solids than the pulled-out 2D of Fatboyslim,
the obvious final progression was a fully 3D Fatabet (top right), which
replaced my signature panel on the 'paper space' drawing files - main/left-hand
image, taking the original circular disc concept to a full sphere.
New 'W' mind! The constriction of boolean geometries meant some simplification to get the curved ogee 'edges' to go-in
properly! In simple terms, boolean means "Right, OR wrong, there is NO grey", and
if your invisible mesh, underlying everything, has a single fault, the whole
thing is 100% wrong!
I'm actually tackling a letter 'R' in the
bottom-right shot and you can see how you pull-up the 2D 'R' (white lines),
leaving you with an extruded, R-shaped rod (red lines), which you then subtract
from a solid sphere (pink Lines) leaving you with a stable ball-letter, that
then needs some sharp-edges rounding-off, which is where it can all go very wrong;
if the continuous ogee (which runs right around the edges of each 'trench' or
hole) won't go-in when told to!
For instance, the ogee running round the
larger trenches in the 'H', have to have a greater radius than the smaller
trenches in the 'W', which can affect the visual uniformity of the different
letters in the alphabet, a uniformity which is precisely what I've been trying
to achieve sine 1981! 'D' notwithstanding - the bastard, so; you have to
compromise at each stage, but these two look OK together . . . I think?
And . . . it's all good fun, that's the
thing, it's another skill, it's another life-experience, you know? Another box
ticked in an otherwise miserably short life. Parachuting is still on the list!
