How do the letters change the content?
Through this three-year experiment I gained an intimate understanding of the anatomy and integrity of letterforms and a close familiarity with detailed vector editing, type design software and encoding, and very iterative processes.
Across a multitude of testing and revising stages, with ample opportunities to play with form and recognize the artistic value of letterforms, this concept became a full-fledged font family, free-and-open-source for others to test and experiment on. To construct 'Loyal' I routinely checked and researched my reference fonts to determine what was standard in Transitional, Humanist, and modern type design and what would otherwise best suit the needs of my typeface. The question I thought about most of all was what problem I was trying to solve.
What is the 'tool' of Loyal? To figure it out I tested out many different approaches to medium and mark making.
In the digital step of the process, it is extremely important to work as non-destructively as possible and with complete mathematical uniformity. There are also a lot of subtleties that must be taken into account every step of the way.
Animated type specimens are a great way to display variability.
The most interesting thing about the last stages of this project was thinking about what sort of content the forms I was creating would convey. What do the forms and spaces say? The words came to me from the forms, not the other way around, which is the typical way in design.
