Hitchcut font, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock and Saul Bass, is my homage to their work and the film Vertigo.
A homage to Saul Bass
Creating a new font can be an arduous task. Not this time; it’s going to be different. This time, I’m not going to sketch it out or even touch Illustrator. I’m gonna draw it right into glyphs app.
The Hitchcut Font
I’m calling it Hitchcut — a play on Hitchcock and cut out. It’s wholly inspired by the movie poster vertigo, and it’s a homage more than a slavish copy. For the Hitchcut font, I wanted to have that childlike, playful look and feel. Its letter shapes are simple and even border on crude. Straight lines for everything, like it’s been cut out with scissors.
Hitchcut Font — The Fun Part
After researching and surrounding myself with everything Saul Bass, it was time to get to work. This is the first time that I’m creating everything in glyphs app. I normally design the letters in Illustrator and copy them over — but not this time. I started to draw rough shapes, only using straight lines and using the least amount of points. I started with the capital letters and just kept everything simple. After I had all the main uppercase characters, I moved to the lowercase, then the numbers and punctuation. It was all done quite quickly; I got all the basic characters done in a couple of hours.
Hitchcut Contextual Alternatives
Contextual alternatives allow you to replace a letter with an alternative version. So, if you typed ABBA, each letter would be slightly different. I wanted three alternatives for each character in uppercase and lowercase. I didn’t re-draw the three versions — I just copied and tweaked them. What I ended up creating is 26 x 3 = 78 Characters. More work but worth it. Once I was finished, I just exported as .otf and tested the hell out of it. Looking at the alternative letters, they were quite subtle; next time, I’ll make them a bit more obvious.
Conclusion
Very happy with how the Hitchcut typeface turned out. I’ve got a new skill under my belt. I have learned about contextual alternatives. It’s really amazing what you can do with a bit of scripting. Now, if I ever get the time, I want to add different weights, like a light and bold version. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, oh well.
That is all.