#type blog — Rebecca Armstrong Design Ltd

Someone mentioned in a comment that they would love to hear more about Veotec. Well, here it is, the full story on how I created Veotec and what the methodical approach involved.

Veotec is my second typeface I created and published with The Northern Block type foundry. It was my aim to produce something that people were interested in and something that people needed.

I knew I wanted to create something legible & functional, so started researching into what type classification would do a good job at this. I discovered that the humanist classification was often very legible due to its open forms. I worked on this as a basis for my sketches and initial designs.

I always start the design process on paper and I often find drawing something over and over again, often develops into something very different.

Through designing my previous typeface, I knew that very heavy weights often compromise slightly on legibility due to loosing some of the negative space around the joins. From this it gave me the idea of increasing the negative space in the lighter weights in turn giving me more negative space in the heavier weights allowing a more open feel.

I continued sketching designs to see how characters would look with more negative space, achieving this by increasing the angle of the joins. I ended up with very sharp steep angles.

When creating Veotec on the computer, the angles were softened just enough to still give a sharp feel but without looking like a display typeface.

I decided against serifs so that it would be more legible on screen, I didn't want too much distraction that became pixelated on screen and at small sizes. Simplicity is key. To give this typeface style without the distraction, I implemented the idea of taking away from characters instead of adding, giving even more negative space. I sharpened edges and cropped parts of the letters giving slanted endings & a technical feel which also gave a more dramatic feel at larger sizes.

Rounded curves were added to balance the sharp curves and create a bit of contrast, in turn creating a great looking typeface that was functional.

A lot of testing was involved to get the characters right; printing at a range of weights and sizes and testing on screen.

To give the typeface more uses and allow the user to give their project more personality I offered a good range of weights and alternative characters.

Ligatures were important to help the visual flow of text in longer copy so I made a good range of ligatures. In total there is 27.

I won't miss out the importance to kerning and spacing! This was a huge part of creating Veotec and always will be with my fonts. Thousands of kerning pairs were implemented, so there can be a huge variety of possible combinations of letters, symbols and numbers that sit together nicely and look well designed.

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