Experimental Numerals
While paying tremendous amounts of attention today in “The History of Existentialism,” I doodled out this non-lining, mostly sans-serif set of numerals on some Kierkegaard. I am quite fond of the little guys. Does anyone know of a font with a numeral set that lines like this?
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
8 Comments
These are very close in feel to the numerals used during the American Arts & Crafts movement. Stickley, Greene & Greene, Mission Style, etc.
These aren’t exactly the same, but have a look here:
http://www.crafthome.com/subsidiarypages/fonts/Font2framepagemenu.htm
http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/linotype/eccentric/
By no means exact matches, but I have seen fonts in this style that have numerals very similar to what you’ve done here.
Thanks for the links Jeffery! There are some visual cues linking what you posted and what I have sketched out here. It seems that most of the fonts used during the American Arts & Crafts movement featured lining numerals though. I am more interested in how this particular set lines, meaning the descenders on the 2, 4, 7, and 9, and the ascenders on the 3, 5, 6, and 8.
yeah, like I said, the links I sent you weren’t exact, but there are others in the Arts & Crafts family that look just like these, descenders/ascenders and all. I’ll see if I can dig up what I’m talking about and post a link.
Enjoy the site, by the way. Came to it by way of John Gruber’s Daring Fireball site. I’m not a design guy, but your work was interesting enough for me to subscribe to your feed.
Thanks a lot Jeffery, I appreciate it! I have gotten a good bit of traffic from Daring Fireball…
I quite love these , they have a great feel to them, they’re thin but stable. Although the “8″ looks a bit small in the top.
Ah, Kip! Glad to see you’re still reading!
The “8″ did pose the most problems for me. I felt as though it should match the 3 most closely because of how similar the forms are, but I didn’t like it much with a sharp corner. I will, at some point in my life, make a font and I know already I am going to put an inordinate amount of time into the numerals.
There’s no way I could stop reading , I check back every so often to get some inspiration to overcome my designers block. I was making a font , But I quit spur of the moment I realized that there is a tonne of detail that goes into one , and the numerals propose problems just with getting them to match the font but at the same time being unique.
Beautiful! Archer has ascenders and descenders but on different numbers.