I kinda can’t decide whether this is great or terrible:
Start a font by tweaking all glyphs at once. With more than twenty parameters, design custom classical or experimental shapes. Once prototyping of the font is done, each point and curve of a glyph can be easily modified.
Explore, modify, compare, export with infinite variations.
[Vimeo]
I think it’s pretty terrible. The thought that goes into designing a font versus just moving sliders is completely different. Understanding how real typographers create type, with all the considerations into legibility and consistency and personality, and then comparing it to moving sliders around for a few minutes is just crazy.
I couldn’t agree more! This shouldn’t have even been posted, as it seems so many are stupid enough to believe it is a good thing—just because it is a Kickstarter project.
With that said, I believe Adobe is a company that should take the lead in taking the blame for something like this originating. Yes, there are other high-quality type houses, but they’ve all mirrored Adobe’s pricing structure.
The high volume of poor-quality ‘free’ type and projects like this Kickstarter nonsense is a result of the tremendously high costs that Adobe (and others) charge for the ‘good stuff.’ Most are uneducated as to the difference, and John’s waffling on the issue just feeds into the mass idiocy.
Oh, and Adobe’s answer to the problem by offering Typekit is a joke. I want real fonts, not vaporware when something better than the Creative Cloud comes along (and it will).
i think it’s terribly great, although i could see some greatly terrible results coming from it.
i think that creating this tool will give a whole new generation of tinkerers the ability to play around and learn a lot about fonts. Does that mean most of the results would be worth anything? Probably not. Does that mean we shouldn’t be able to play? Definitely not.
That being said the tool appears to be pretty much done not sure why they need a kickstarter for it.
The phrase “Ransom Note Technology” popped into my head.