Typeface Design – Cosmodrome

This is an old typeface I started in late 92. Originally it was for use in ads for a college radio show. Playing around with very orthogonal forms - a line and a circle. I had a bunch of ideas for forms and I spread the different ideas out over two weights - one set of ideas in the bold, one set of ideas in the regular. They looked somewhat similar....but different. Some of the characters I liked, and some I didn’t. These are a few of the old characters. Some okay ideas there, but some of them are just too obtuse. I ended consolidating the two different sets into one bold weight a while later. I took all the characters I liked and if they were in the lighter weight I made them bold. Over time I would still use it for a headline or try it out in a logo, but found myself drawing whole new characters (in that style) when I thought they just didn’t work.

Now that I once again have the means to work on type, I decided to have another crack at this. There was still something I liked about it, and decided to take it in a different direction. Namely to standardize it a bit, have lots of alternate characters, have sans-serif and serif versions, and maybe if I have no life, a semi-serif version, and have a few different weights, and maybe even wide and condensed variants. I still have a bunch to do on just this font and weight before I even move on to any other aspects of it.

I spend my days trying to wrap my brain around learning HTML code and all that, then when I go home I spend hours trying to figure out the intricacies of OpenType coding. I am just a barrel of fun.

Like I said, lots that will still change about this, but I was keen to generate this as an actual font so I could play around with it a little bit. Even though it’s not entirely ready, it is still valuable to use it in page layout or illustration program and type it out, see how it all looks as lines and passages of text, etc.

And I’ve gotten close to completing a bold serif version as well.

I think what I’ve come up with is the logical result of tossing DIN, American Typewriter and Lubalin Graph into a crock pot and letting it stew to create this. Or, to be all type geek about it, a globose adnate unmodulated geometric modernist typeface.

Another variant a good chunk of the way done. Decided to go back to a naming convention I’ve used before This one will be Micromum, the ones I did before will be Maximum, and in between that will be the Minimum and Medium, and I’m also going to do an even heavier version which will be called Megamum.