Sunday, September 7, 2014

Glyph design: the lowercase c

o
i
a

b
l
n


c
j
t
y
w
x

k
z

g
s
The letter ‘c’ is deceptively simple. It is a single open curve, and much of the design work on this letter is purely visual so there are few pointers I can give you.
The bottom half of the ‘c’ is almost identical to that of the letter ‘e’. But instead of closing off into a loop, the top of the curve finishes off in a terminal, usually with blobbing. The top left of the letter is often flattened slightly.

It’s not easy to break down this letter’s construction into steps. Your best bet is to just tweak it until it looks good to your eye. Like most round letters, it’s also helpful to draw it alongside some other letters from your font to make sure they get along nicely. Here’s where I drew Floribunda’s ‘c’ (and it’s ‘t’ too) :
So basically, that’s all I can say about the ‘c’.
A few more tweaks
Here’s a short test text with the ‘c’ and ‘t’ (yes, I am aware I’m missing an ‘fi’ ligature) :