Fifth Leg
I may be taking on something bigger than I can ever finish in a month and hardly in a hackweek, but it is both fun unknown territory and something that is needed badly.
openSUSE uses a rather spiffy Cholla header font by Sibylle Hagmann. The problem is it isn’t a Free nor free font*, making it hard for the community to produce openSUSE branded material. So you guessed it, I’d like to design an original type to replace it. Apart from Lingdings (bullets font for OpenOffice Impress) I’ve never done this. Partly because the font designer and even type setting community is very pedantic, deeply following a strict set of rules. Good fonts come from a lot of experience. So be warned, this is pure amateurism, a font designed by a non-type-designer.
To help me stay focused, I’ve come up with these attributes I’d like the font to have.
- Simplistic, technical sans serif.
- Heavy. Rounded.
- Will not do normal weight, this is a headline font. ‘Close’ to Cholla Wide Bold.
- Only basic latin glyph coverage for now (a-z, A-Z, 0-9).
- Low contrast.
- Open Font License.
- I don’t aim to kern the font properly this week.
Thanks Garrett for suggesting the name.
August 25th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Good luck!
Typography is one of the hardest aspects of graphic design.
Can’t wait to see the result.
August 25th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Cool project – going to happen in a public repo or anything?
August 25th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
What tools are you planning to use?
August 25th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
@steven I’ll make it appear on cgit.freedesktop.org
@kristian Inkscape, Fontforge.
August 25th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Free fonts! Wow! That is one of the weaker areas in the Free content area for us, so thanks very much for working on one. Rock on!=)
August 25th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
I’d definitely recommend checking out the forums and such at typophile.com as you progress. The folks there are really helpful, and more than willing to give advice on typefaces in development. Lots of the people that hang out, there, are pretty big names in the typographic world, so their advice is trustworthy, too…
August 25th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Thanks Andrew, if it’s half of what blenderartists.org did for me for Blender/3D I’m definitely going to run it up through typophile community.
August 25th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Yeah! Brilliant move and great name too. Pretty excited to see what your creativity will give birth to
Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, there’s also an f.d.o list about open fonts and you may find it useful to follow (contribute to?) the discussions on planet.open-fonts.org as you embark on your typographic journey.
August 25th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Mmm, I meant planet.open-fonts.org.
Might be fun to try out the spiro approach…
August 25th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Oooh, best of luck
. Will you write a short tutorial when its done? FontForge seems scary to say the least…
August 25th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Great initiative! Yay for more free fonts!
Let me know if you need any help with characters from the Swedish alphabet.
August 26th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Don’t worry about kerning, but getting the metrics good is as important as getting the black shapes of the letters good
June 27th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Ahoj Jakube,
v ned??vn?© dobÄ› jsem pot?™eboval pÄ›kn?? Corporate font a tak jsem m?rnÄ› upravil (resp. “vylep??il”) Fifth Leg o nÄ›kolik featur:
- p?™idal jsem z??kladn? matematick?© a typografick?© znaky (/*-+, uvozovky atp.)
- m?rnÄ› jsem font upravil (nap?™?klad minuskov?© r bylo dle m?©ho n??zoru p?™?li?? “??irok?©”
- vygeneroval jsem OTF a TTF pro mo??nost pou??it? na jin??ch platform??ch
- p?™idal jsem do fontu k??dov?© str??nky, tak??e ve font a softwarech, nepodporuj?c?ch plnÄ› UTF je nyn? mo??no font plnÄ› pou???vat
http://wp.podsmrkem.com/FifthLegCE-OTF+TTF.zip (70 kB)
Ps: D?ky moc za font?k
June 27th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
sry, psal jsem to v Chrome + UTF-8 a je to nejaky…
June 30th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
@Stewwwie nejaky email/jabber kontakt?
July 8th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
@Jakub: Ahoj, promin, dovolenkoval jsem… Muj mail na je v komentari
May 4th, 2010 at 10:57 am
Hi Jakub!
Funny, I thought “FifthLeg” was a gegl reference: http://people.gnome.org/~bratsche/gegl.html
Dave.
January 11th, 2013 at 6:48 pm
Any chance you could grant another license for it – perhaps dual license if you want to keep OFL for some reason? OFL isn’t really a free license, since it forbids sale*.
* Yes, I know there is a “loophole”, but I don’t believe it’s really free if you need to use a loophole, and I highly doubt any attempt to actually use the loophole would hold up in court.