For Want of a Font

I'm in search of a font. I thought I had one I liked but I was wrong. It all has to do with the web comic I've been working on for ages. Besides the subject matter of said comic and it's involvement with ideas from my prints, paintings, and photos one more thing I am concerned with is my choice of font to letter the comic in.

I don't want to letter it by hand or go with a traditional all caps comic book font. I want an uppercase/lowercase font but there are not a lot of interesting comic book fonts of that nature. It's a small niche. I moved on to some regular body copy fonts that I thought might work for me but they all seemed too mechanical for my liking. I don't want a stark contrast between hand drawn art and a mechanical font.

My next step was to rough some fonts up. That's when I convert them in Adobe Illustrator to "artwork" and skew and roughen them up a bit using some filters. I'm always coming up with filter "recipes" in Photoshop and Illustrator to apply to images so this is nothing new. It took me a while but I finally found a font and "recipe" that I liked. I though I was done.

Then everything lingered. The comic wasn't turning out to my liking. I worked on a lot of strips but never finished anything. That probably had to do with the fact I had no idea what the finished format was going to be. I didn't have the size totally knocked down.

As a matter of fact I was working at three sizes. Since this comic was supposed to unify my comic book, print, and web work I was trying to figure out the perfect physical size that would satisfy all three. I though I had it but I didn't. Hence me never finishing anything. If you don't know what size the finished building is going to be it's never going to be finished. Or something like that.

Today I found my size and format and actually finished one of the strips. Except for the font that is. Y'see in this new format the font size went up a couple of points. Not much but it was enough to make me not like my old font and roughening recipe. After I printed out a copy of the strip the font didn't look good. It looked shaky. Like it was a mistake. It looked like something went wrong in the process and it wasn't really supposed to look that way. Not a good thing.

So I spent some more time looking through my fonts today. I'm sick of looking through fonts. Especially because I am looking for something specific that probably doesn't exist. I want a body copy font for a comic strip that is a little bit funky but not too funky because it can't fight with the drawing for attention. And it has to be easy to read. Most funky fonts are display fonts and are not easy to read as body copy. I hate to have to struggle to read a comic because of the font. I don't want that for my strip. Call me picky.

I found a font I vaguely like called "Montara Gothic" which I am using straight up but it's not really satisfying me. The font I was using before that which I now don't like at all was a "Frutiger" all messed up and roughened.

Though I've always used and appreciated a wide variety of fonts I've never been a hard core type guy like some of the designers I've known. My knowledge of fonts is fair to middling but clearly not deep enough to satisfy my very particular need in this case. I will have to keep my eyes open.