The idea started out with Ogham - animating Ogham as the symbols follow curves, and to use that for displaying informaiton on-screen.

In case you don’t know, Ogham is an alphabet that started out to write early Irish. Here is "nundrum" using the alphabet so you can see how it looks:

That is a striking look, but would be utterly indecepherable! I don’t want to refer to a code chart just to read the screen.

So I started playing around with writing the Latin alphabet connected by a baseline. That was also a great reason to break out the new fountian pen and bottle of ink. Yes, I have a glowing fountain pen and journal.

First up was the baseline itself, and I liked the way Ogham lines begin and end with those angled >/< marks. But I also felt the font would have to be more "curvy" if it was to accomodate the usual letters. A little doodling also made me realize that fewer pen-lifts and backtracks would be better for the handwritten version.

Those doodles led me to use these two-ended stuctures as the base period, exclamation mark, and question mark. Letters would be drawn on the line in between:

Here are some early versions of a through z made into SVG based on my doodles:

Not bad …​ but also not good. The written version is even worse. Letters like c and s are unbalanced in size. Many of the others are unreadable, like q. But o and m, n and uvw were good and fit the kind of style I was going for.

This first alphabet helped set the feel for the font: many similar curves, some extending the midline, some deviating from it, and many mirrored parts.

Some letters were a much bigger problem than others.

After spending an hour or two over a few evenings I had mostly settled on the final design. I don’t know where the name came from, but "fountainvoid" popped into my head and it seems to fit. That name also shows off the font nicely:

I installed FontForge to make the font. There was quite a bit to learn, but the documentation for it covered everything fairly well. I wish there had been some better guides and perhaps videos on using the bezier tool. Though it looks a lot like Inkscape’s it does not behave the same way. I had to fumble into figuring out some things like shift-drag will constrain the movement of a node but only after the dragging has started.

The spiro tool is not one I used for this project. There were some videos that cover how it works, but this font just didn’t need it. The geometric feel of the letters worked fine with bezier curves.

Getting all of the above done had taken me five days of off-and-on work, maybe less. In truth it wasn’t very hard at all. And with that thought I had jinxed myself.

Fountainvoid was lacking numbers. I realized that would be a big problem if I was to incorporate it into other projects. Designing ten numbers took double the time of desgining twenty-six letters! Our standard Arabic numerals simply did not lend themselves to the style of the font. I tried many of the same approaches used in the letters - only use half the stroke, or leave void areas, or use illusory contours - nothing worked! Most attempts also caused ambiguation problems with the existing letters.

Other ideas that didn’t work:

So the numbers deviate much more from their everyday counterparts than the letters do.

Each number had to be evolved out on it’s own. One was simple. Three was a breakthrough - it was turned on an angle and slightly raised to create a crescent shaped void. Five was stolen from Roman † and seven inspired by that. Nine was hardest, but in the end looks like a normal 9 but with a sort of tail.

Here are the numbers, surrounded by parenthesis:

If you take a look below, you can see where the numbers are "hidden" in the line:

If you are interested in it, I will put the font files on Github at some point in the near future. There are a few characters to round out and some kerning errors to fix.