Font inspired by the title and time cards in the Nickelodeon cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants
Click here to download the font
Note: The current version of the font, version 3.3 (December 13 2020), has full support for almost all languages written in the Latin alphabet (so, French, Spanish, Polish—even rare ones like Esperanto), all languages written in Cyrillic (Russian, Ukranian, etc), Greek, and Hebrew. The font has 1,182 glyphs.
This font is released under the SIL Open Font License (OFL), see the file LICENSE in the repository.
Before December 14 2020 (350de38f), I reserved the font name «Some Time Later». I removed this legal requirement, and this applies retroactively. You may modify any version of Some Time Later and redistribute your changes under the same name as long as you credit me and redistribute the license file.
I never meant to reserve a font name in the first place and didn't understand the legal implications as it was at the time a FontForge default. Cf. fontforge/fontforge#4434.
Some glyphs in this font and OpenType features were copied from Noto Sans Hebrew, © Google Inc. That font is also an open source SIL OFL font. I'm gradually moving towards removing these glyphs.
Some Time Later is a recreation of the classic SpongeBob Squarepants™ typeface used in the credits, in the title cards of some episodes and most famously in the time cards.
CREATION NOTES First, screenshots were collected of the typeface in action from fan wikis such as SpongeBob Wikia.
Each glyph was hand traced, no automatic tools such as Adobe Illustrator's "Image Trace" feature nor InkScape's PoTrace were used. This helps prevent artifacts which make the font work well even at very high point sizes.
In the event of multiple glyphs being found in the source materials for a given character, the OpenType feature "Stylistic Alternates" was used to preserve both glyphs in the font. In each case multiple samples were consulted to determine which form was the "main" form of the glyph, and which was the alternate form.
This happened with the Q and I glyphs, which have the Stylistic Alternates Q and I.
For fun, and since the source material contained a fraction in the form of "61/2 HOURS LATER", the font was made further OpenType aware by adding the Diagonal Fractions feature. enable-able in fine software everywhere. This allows complex fractions such as 895/702's to be written with ease.
COMPARISON TO THE STATE OF THE ART A font with the same aims as this one exists on DaFont, "Krabby Patty". But its outlines are very poor, either due to pour quality of reference material or automatic tracing.
Some Time Later supports more than 20 languages, and has the entire Latin-1 Unicode Block in the font. Glyphs which were not part of the source material were carefully constructed based on guidance provided from other glyphs.
Other symbols, such as the Euro (€), Indian Rupee (₹) and Philippine Peso sign (₱) were added as well. "Krabby Patty" (2012) doesn't support any language but English.
LICENSE Best of all, this font is 100%free for use in any work, personal or commercial. In the United States, due to the decision in Eltra Corp vs. Ringer, typeface designs are not copyrightable. Since this font is not based on any prior font software (due to Krabby Patty being very low quality and the typeface from Nickelodeon being available nowhere online), this font can be released for free, and so is.
This font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, full text of which is available either in the archive or at http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
Please note that typeface protections notwithstanding, you are still under obligation of international trademark and copyright law, especially if this font is used in a commercial product. The Eltra Corp decision won't save you if you sell this font printed out on unlicensed SpongeBob™ themed merchandise, so stick to non-Nickelodeon uses.
All of that said, I hope that you enjoy using this font as much as I enjoyed making it. :)
If you find a problem with the font open a bug @ https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/some-time-later
If you want to show your support for the time it took me to make this font, you can send Bitcoin to 1KR2SithJueNs93y6JV7zdE17q3xgLWKSx
Version 2 update information
some Time Later has been updated and has the following new features:
- Cyrillic character set! A friend sent me an image of a SpongeBob comic book published in Russia. Normally I wouldn't care about something like that, but it showed that the size of the canon was larger than I previously thought! I diligently sought out as much material as I could find online about the comic and got to digitizing. If you find a problem, please let me know.
Unfortunately, I had a lot of trouble finding the lowercase. I believe that in order to save time, the producers of the comic book used a different, but similar font for the lowercase and only made Cyrillic capitals. The font that they used for the lowercase is a different SpongeBob font called "SpongeFont SquareType" (which ironically, the version online also has no Cyrillic charset - maybe that's my next project).
Luckily for you I know enough about font design to make the lower case by myself...Nickelodeon should be paying me for this :D У меня было много веселья делает кириллический набор символов. НАСЛАЖДАТЬСЯ! Моя семья на самом деле украинский лол
- experimental auto-kerning via FontForge's auto-kern algorithm. If you think it's kerned too tightly let me know (KERN)
- a new alternate character which is used in the Russian SpongeBob logo: a -> a (SALT)