As I’ve said before, it’s important to periodically combine your glyphs into words and see how they work together. You should already be examining your typeface at the word level. At this point, Floribunda has enough letters that we can also start assembling short
test texts. Test texts can be as long as a paragraph or even a page, but for now, we’re just looking for problems at the line level. A few issues I saw right off the bat was that the ‘f’ terminal was a bit too light, and the spur of the ‘a’ too thin.
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A test text for Floribunda. Test texts don’t necessarily have to make sense,
they just simulate font usage at the line, paragraph or page level. |
I also wasn’t a fan of the bowls on the ‘b’ and derived letters, so I redrew them with fresh curves.
Of course, changing the ‘b’, ‘p’, ‘d’, and ‘q’ also meant that the ‘e’ and ‘o’ needed some slight tweaks to work well with them. This is one place where having your typeface in a test text can be immensely helpful—so that you can see any potential problems modifications might cause.
After a bit more polish, Floribunda now looks a bit like this:
