Show HN: Campy the Font

31 points by karjaluoto 4 years ago | 7 comments

karjaluoto 4 years ago |

I needed a type family that felt hand-printed. Lots of these fonts exist, but they have problems. Some are hard to use because their letterforms are overly varied. Others are limited to just the alphabet and a few punctuation marks. Almost none have multiple weights (which I find useful).

With Campy, I wanted to try my hand at creating a type family that addressed these points. So, I drew out a reasonably complete Latin character set (208 glyphs including accents, special marks, symbols, etc.) by hand. I then corrected each of the glyphs to be more consistent and aligned. From there, I added a total of 7 weights and corresponding italics. This project turned out to be pretty time-consuming.

I’m not a type designer, so I’ve probably done some things wrong with Campy. That said, I like how it looks casual without feeling too messy. Throughout the project, I came to look upon Campy a bit like Comic Sans, but (hopefully) more functional.

foxtrottbravo 4 years ago |

A beautiful typeface - unfortunately completely outside my financial range but a great typeface nonetheless.

I hope to seeing it in the wild sometime. Really, really beautiful

karjaluoto 4 years ago | |

Thanks! I appreciate you saying so.

I’m a total hack when it comes to type design, so, I’m still pretty unsure of this one. I go from seeing all of the problems in it, to thinking: “hey—that looks OK.”

One discovery that helped with both this (and the site we built it for) came from reading about wabi-sabi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

That perspective helped me see that imperfections might be part of a thing’s appeal. This is a very different viewpoint for me. I tend to “need” everything pixel perfect—but I’m not sure that’s as important as I once thought.

Rendello 4 years ago |

Another camp-y typeface showed up here recently, from the US's National Park service:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29573976

karjaluoto 4 years ago | |

That’s a nice typeface!

codingdave 4 years ago |

I have to pay more if my app or web site gets more traffic? No, I don't think so. Fonts are useful, but there is no way I'd let a font turn into a cost center.

karjaluoto 4 years ago | |

Fair enough. I understand your point. Also, there are plenty of really good type families available for free. From what I’ve seen, though, pricing based on traffic is pretty common among those selling type.

Plus, these are single purchases, not recurring fees. For most organizations that makes these costs trivial. (I.e., License the font indefinitely for about the same cost as an hour of a consultant’s time.)