Targaryen, a new font is born

This is my font called Targaryen after the royal House Targaryen of Westeros from the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin. It is still a work in progress but the moment has come when I feel confident to show some of the work that was done so far.

The initial idea came while I was reading the third book, A Storm of Swords, from the mentioned series. I wanted to make a font that would be part gothic but with a modern twist. For the initial idea i scribbled the letter u in my notebook. And so it started.

Next it was time to design the whole series of letters that would have the same feel about them. Notice how the letters s and z were later changed due to the fact that I wanted a more modern approach.

When I sketched enough letters I scanned the whole thing and imported in Illustrator. Then I traced the letters. Using parts of some letters in others saved me some time. The letter y is, for example, based on the letter u (look at the sketch above).

The last step was to bring all of the letter in FontLab and now the tricky part starts. It is to time to define letter spacing, kerning and all of the “fun” stuff that comes with it. After that It will be time to draw a set of uppercase letters (as you might have noticed only low ease letters were done so far), ligatures, punctuation, diacritic signs and do the spacing and kerning adjustments. Still a lot of work to be done but so far so good.

I wil continue to write on my progress on the font. When the first beta version will be released everyone will be invited to take it for a spin and add comments regarding the design. So far I have figured that the font is somewhat useless at smaller sizes on a computer but behaves really nice in print. Larger sizes do not tend to cause any problems even on screen.