I want to create a small custom set of extended uppercase characters for a company logo.
I am starting with H&FJ's Idlewild and then extending it even further. I'm initially squashing it vertically to 75%. This looks as bad as you'd imagine - the contrast of the letterforms is distorted (the horizontal lines look too thin compared to the vertical lines). However my eariler rough attempt to mimic the original contrast (ratio of width of vertical lines to horizontal lines is approximately 7:6) created something that I'm fairly happy with.
(Note that whilst I have now purchased Idlewild, I initially copied sample text from the H&FJ website and used Illustrator's trace function to create what is shown below, which explains the rather random bezier point placement. Incidentally I actually quite like some of the quirks this introduced to the letterforms - in particular the terminals of the S and the top of the A)
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The word has only seven characters - ACHORST
Some of these (HT) are easy to fix manually. But in particular the round letters (COS) require a bit more thought, and I'm hoping somebody might have some suggestions.
I'm pretty sure back 15 years ago I could have got most of the way there quickly with CorelDRAW. From memory there was an option to use strokes ('outlines' in Corel terminology) which weren't uniform height and width. So in this instance I'd create a 'nib shape' for the stroke which was much taller than it was wide, and applying this to the letterforms would restore the contrast to roughly that of the original. (I appreciate that typographers don't simply do something like this to create different weights of a typeface, but for my purposes I suspect it would get me most of the way there and then I could tweak it visually.)
The only wasy I can see to alter the stroke shape in Illustrator is via the Profile dropdown in the stroke dialog options, but this seems to be purely for 'artisitc' effect and entirely inappropriate for my purposes.
Any ideas?
