Phaser is my very own, very special typeface. I made it in a Typeface Design course lead by the one and only Ben Kiel of XYZ Type. In the course, we were tasked with selecting any typeface within the public domain to revive according to a brief of our own creation. I chose to pursue the entirely asinine idea of making a font for Cowboys vs. Aliens movies. And so, Phaser was born.

Throughout its gestation, though, I faced many novel challenges—primarily, what could a Cowboys vs. Aliens font possibly look like? This and many other challenges I explore in depth below, and all in service of celebrating my great, stupid baby. I love it with all my heart.

Phase 1: Research

I began my research in the rare books collections of the John M. Olin Library, and quickly became drawn to the woodcut typefaces of the ATF archives and the Rob Roy Kelly collection. Some of what I discovered can be seen here.

Ultimately, I chose to revive Aldine Expanded. It was a chunky, reverse-contrast typeface produced by William H. Page & Co. in 1870. I liked its heft, I liked its goofiness, I liked its nearly complete character set.

I would look to Aldine Expanded as well as its predecessors (the Antique and Clarendon styles), its contemporaries (Aldine and Aldine Ornamented), and its successors (Nick Sherman’s Brylski, Buffalo, and various modern revivals) as important reference points throughout the development of Phaser.

Phase 2: Ideation

Next, the brief. My revival was meant to:

Revive Aldine Expanded
Be used for sci-fi western movie posters
Be printed using offset lithography at approximately 200 – 350pt
Be aimed at a younger American audience
Be able to be read quickly from 40ft away

My very first step was to draw Aldine as it was, without any reinterpretation or optimization. But the kerning-less, overshoot-less quality of wood type resulted in all sorts of balance and weight issues. Luckily, I was drawing the font digitally, so as I iterated I would, in time, be able to smooth over many of these awkward vestiges of woodcut's contraints. Luckier still, my sci-fi spin would allow me to inconspicuously make some more extreme optical adjustments.

But before that, I had to figure out what my sci-fi spin was. How would I make type sci-fi sleek but western sturdy? I looked to features of other wood typefaces for answers, and I began to experiment with a bifurcated serif. I used whiteout on my intitial Aldine drawings to iterate. Soon, the “Digital Tuscan” was born. This was the true starting point for Phaser. From there on out, I focused on producing and refining.

Phase 3: Development

Designing a typeface is about creating a beautiful set of letters rather than a set of beautiful letters. Spacing, weight, and cohesion were continuosuly referenced as metrics for progress.

Progress proofs I printed throughout the semester can be seen here. Of all my letters, the H and the O proved to be some of the harder ones to make, which was challenging, because they are the two characters off of which you're supposed to base everything else. The weight of the H moved around a lot, carving out counters and evening out the somewhat sinewy reverse-contrast. The O, on the other hand, just always felt out of place with its lack of slits. At the end, I finally landed on an unobtrusive little notch to cohere the set.

Characters like E raised issues with the alignment of the serifs, while the g and y struggled to balance the weight of their descenders. As the days past, adaptions away from wood type spacing caused characters like r and M to stray further and further from their references. Numerals provided a unique challenge, as I had to learn how to apply my system made for Latin marks to Arabic ones.

Spacing progressed nicely throughout the semester. The main thing you’ll see in these proofs is the slow improvement of typographic color and consistency. Since Phaser is very much a display face, and since it is unruly, wide, and has chunky slab serifs, the spacing will not look perfect until it’s kerned (an ongoing, sisyphean task). But you can enjoy how much better the O’s look now.

Lastly, making the accents was a lot of fun. I had some trouble balancing the light weight of the accents with the bold, wide letters. They’re still not perfect, but I think they fit comfortably together. Big shout out to Benguiat Buffalo for being an invaluable reference.

Phase 4: Application

The penultimate part of the project was testing if we had met our self-assigned briefs by using our fonts in their proper contexts. I put together some space cowboy movie posters using exisiting films of the genre. Phaser met its brief, being simultaneously legible and graphic.

And then, at the very, very end, I made a process book, pulling content from my folders of rigorously archived research, sketches, and specimens.

Phaser is the culmination of a semester’s worth of work, and it was a true labor of love. The typeface is far from done though. I still need to develop more glyphs to meet the Latin-1 Supplement Unicode standard. And, of course, I still have left to do the most daunting process of all—kerning.

I learned a lot through this process. It reaffirmed my love of typography (I’ll definitely be returning to Robofont). And I gained some key typographic take-aways such as: legibility and personality are often inversely related, spacing is half of drawing, the more specific your audience is the more answers you give yourself to ambiguities, a system is paramount (at the beginning, for mass-production), the system doesn’t matter (at the end, when you have to break your precious rules for optical balance), and—above all else—strive to make a beautiful set of letters, as opposed to a set of beautiful letters.

I love you, Phaser. *Pew Pew*