With Campy, I wanted to try my hand at creating a type family that addressed these points. So, I drew out a reasonably complete Latin character set (208 glyphs including accents, special marks, symbols, etc.) by hand. I then corrected each of the glyphs to be more consistent and aligned. From there, I added a total of 7 weights and corresponding italics. This project turned out to be pretty time-consuming.
I’m not a type designer, so I’ve probably done some things wrong with Campy. That said, I like how it looks casual without feeling too messy. Throughout the project, I came to look upon Campy a bit like Comic Sans, but (hopefully) more functional.
I hope to seeing it in the wild sometime. Really, really beautiful
I’m a total hack when it comes to type design, so, I’m still pretty unsure of this one. I go from seeing all of the problems in it, to thinking: “hey—that looks OK.”
One discovery that helped with both this (and the site we built it for) came from reading about wabi-sabi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
That perspective helped me see that imperfections might be part of a thing’s appeal. This is a very different viewpoint for me. I tend to “need” everything pixel perfect—but I’m not sure that’s as important as I once thought.
Plus, these are single purchases, not recurring fees. For most organizations that makes these costs trivial. (I.e., License the font indefinitely for about the same cost as an hour of a consultant’s time.)
