Unitas Typeface
Unitas is a Blackletter type face inspired by a previous student’s thesis project, which was a photography collection of Mexican Blackletter lettering and typefaces.
Since majority of the letters were in caps, I did have to compromise and I used a Rotunda style script for the lowercase. While the capitals were created using a series of glyphs, inspired by the book.
The typeface has access to all capital letters, all lowercase, all numbers, as well as exclamation point, question mark, comma, period, apostrophe, quotes, colon, semi-colon, and parenthesis. I still have to get to sorting out the metrics, but if you want the file, its linked below.
Here’s the majority of the characters in the Typeset
Where we started
Round one resulted in a number of ideas, a lot of them looking back could be fun to move forward with, but I did end up landing on the black letter on the bottom left. The goal for sketching was to cover the three main shapes: triangle, circle and square. Following that was experimental sketching, finding the glyphs I’d use to make the letters, as well as consistencies that would help unify them, and how the lower case letters would interact with the uppercase.
Moved on to Illustrator
Spent the most of the time in Illustrator, in retrospect probably should have prototype sketched all of the letters, but I had developed the glyphs already so, so be it. These went through multiple rounds of peer review before bringing them into the final step.
And Finally Font Forge
Font Forge, while a bit more dated than what I’m used to, was an excellent free resource for making the typeface functional. A nice feature that I discovered a tad late was the ability to import vectors directly into it, meaning I could just copy and paste from Illustrator.
The “B” give you kind of a clearer idea of the glyphs that were being used.
