Metrickal

Metrickal is an experimental geometric monospace typeface, created from scratch, and intended for code editing and terminals (shell sessions).

It was designed on a retina display, for retina displays, so it has no hinting and may look bad at chunkier resolutions, or with less-capable type renderers.

The style is intended to mimic what a draftsman's handwriting might look like: Simple but not cartoonish. Sans-serif, with a few exceptions to make the monospace kerning less harsh. Easy to read at smaller point sizes.

By "experimental", I mean that I've never made a typeface from scratch before, so this will probably take a while to look polished, and may never.

By "geometric", I mean that symmetry and math were emphasized first. When I wanted to make a stroke at a 30 degree angle, I calculated where the points should end up, and put them there. If a glyph looked weird, I would sketch it out until I liked it, then go back to the drawing board and try to find lines and curves that followed simple geometric principles and achieved the same effect. That probably sounds pretentious, but another way to say it is: I didn't trust my hand to draw any letters freeform.

Coverage

Currently only ASCII is covered. The range of "unicode snowman" zones looked daunting. But I'm open to filling them in.

License

This typeface is licensed under the Apache 2 License. To avoid confusion, please don't publish your own binary font files for public use under the name "Metrickal" -- come up with your own name, or send me a pull request.

Code

There's no code. Instead, the typeface has been designed in "Glyphs Mini", a great OS X app that you can find here:

http://glyphsapp.com/

I've committed checkpoints so you can go back and see how bad things used to look when it started, and so that (hopefully) future changes will be easier to graphically diff.

Notes

height: 700
x-height: 500
width: 420
left and right margins: 70 each
baseline: -180
punctuation overshoot (top & bottom): 80 each
stroke thickness: 80
ascender height: 800
descender height: 200
total width: 520 (1000x520)

Support

If you need support for a typeface, you might be way out of your depth, but if you want to talk about it, my email is: