Wednesday, March 12, 2014

K22 Hardy Script, a font in progress


I saw a specimen of a font that I really like and I decided to do it. That font is Hardy on page 36 of Dan X. Solo's alphabet book Brushstroke and Free-Style Alphabets: 100 Complete Fonts published by Dover Publications in 1977. 



Knowing that majority of script and brushstroke fonts in Dan X. Solo's Solotype Catalog and alphabet books are from the Filmotype library of photo/film type fonts, I asked around for the provenance of Hardy. A good friend, Vista Bill, confirmed that Hardy is indeed a Filmotype font. Luc Devroye posted scans from the 1955 Filmotype catalog, which lists Hardy as a 1955 font release. Unfotunately, the showing of Hardy was not posted on the site. 

I am aware that Stuart Sandler of Font Diner acquired the rights to the Filmotype library and that the fonts in the library are being digitized. I checked the officially digitized Filmotype fonts and Hardy was not among them. I, however, did not check whether other font foundries already did Hardy because it does not concern me. What matters to me is that Font Diner, dba Filmotype, has not published a digitization of Hardy before I started doing my font. 

The font is still in progress and I have no idea when it will be completed. What I am sure of is that the font will not look exactly like the one in the specimen. Some changes will only be noticed by eagle-eyed type experts while other changes will be very obvious. A good example is the lowercase letter p (compare the p in the two images above.) Expect many more like that in my font. 

It came to my attention that Dos Diez Type already digitized Filmotype Hardy as Icenomina Script. Because of this I decided to abandon my digitization of this font even if Filmotype has not done its own digitization.


And if you are interested in my fonts, you will find almost all of them at ABFonts and OFFSite. I also made available some of my fonts at DaFont and FontspaceIf you happen to find my fonts in other font archives, I did not upload my fonts there and those sites probably stole their content from the sites I linked to. You are solely responsible if you download a virus instead of a font from those unscrupulous sites masquerading as font archives.

2 comments:

  1. Outstanding! You are to be commended for your excellent endeavor, Toto, and for digitizing this beauty from the 1950s!

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  2. What a lovely font!! I can hardly wait for you to finish it!!
    Donna C

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