Scythe
A Blackletter Typeface
Much sketching and
concepting followed…
Capital A and B sketches.
Various lowercase letter sketches.
More lowercase skecthing.
More lowercase sketching.
More lowercase skecthing.
More lowercase sketching.
Assorted punctuation sketches.
Many 's' sketches.
Ampersands, dashes, parenthesis, and others.
Number symbols, asterisks, and slashes.
To create this font, the task was to draw 115 different blackletter characters in a unique style to turn into a font.
The drawn characters were then traced in glyphs and exported to be a fully functional digital typeface.
Proof of life sketch featuring the letters noihya.
Inspired by rotunda forms of blackletter, the letters 'noihya' were the first sketched, giving a base for the rest of the letterforms to come, and giving proof of life to the concept.
The Final Characters
Final lowercase letters.
Final uppercase letters.
Final symbols.
The final character set was created in three parts, uppercase, lowercase, and numbers/symbols.
Key elements of the characters in this typeface are the lack of closed counters in the letterforms, and the 45 degree angle the parallel pen was held at to draw the letterforms.
After the character set was drawn out on paper, the next steps were to scan the letters (seen left) and trace them using Glyphs, paying close attention to stroke width so as to keep the letterforms as close as possible to the original parallel pen strokes created.
The typeface was named scythe, due to the wide curves of the letterforms that terminate in skinny points, similar to the blade of its namesake tool.