Hourglass

Up to this point all my sans fonts — well most of my fonts at all really — have used at most 6 vertical pixels for the x-height and typically only 5 pixels. This is because you need a row for the space and then another row for the dot on the i and then another for descenders.

Well what if we sacrifice the ‘i’ so we can make the x height one pixel taller? The ascenders start to suffer but we can always help that out by curving the join back down before it meets the ascender (and descender) to give it a longer appearance.

This was my first go at tackling that in making a sans that is very clear. I decided to just remove the dots from the i and j and give them a small serif instead. The end result looks a little like Geneva on classic MacOS on comparison and I couldn’t resist borrowing the lower-case w design.

An extra line of vertical space can help it breathe a little and the proportional FZX also looks smart.