Third term we chose between pursuing our revival or our original typeface to move forward with and create additional styles and weights. Mostly everyone in my class went forward with their original, including me. We came to class with sketches of how we thought an italic and heavy or extra bold weight would look and went from there.
Bold: Even though we had spent an entire term drawing the regular weight, problems that might have gone unnoticed became very clear when we began making bold and heavy weights. Issues like spaces and counters closing up, and awkward tangents became new problems to solve in both weights. I often found myself redrawing letters a few times throughout the process and fixing little inconsistencies that came with looking too closely for too long. I had a lot of fun drawing the bold weight because features tend to get more exaggerated. Thicker areas get thicker quickly and the personality of the typeface really starts to show.
Italic: I never knew how italic styles were approached, I guess I always assumed they were redrawn from scratch. We learned a neat little trick where you make “fake italics” through rotating and skewing to bring you to a great starting point of what your oblique italic might look like. Then it’s up to you to go in and finesse everything, and probably make true italic forms rather then just oblique.
Medium: To get a medium weight I used Prepolator and an interpolation script. Interpolation is used to generate intermediate weights between two poles, usually a lighter weight and a heavier weight. Prepolator is a tool that compares two master drawings, making sure each letter has the same number of points, paths, path directions and names to maximize compatibility. I used my regular and bold master drawings to create a 50% interpolation, or Sebring Medium.
I still have a lot of work and reworking to do on Sebring before I even think of releasing it. I’d like to expand the character set and draw more weights.