Lamed feels again like a stick letter, and Qof feels like it has been too rationalized away from its prototypical form in a way that is more appropriate for a display design and less so for a text design. In particular, I am disturbed by the discrepancy between the Lamed and Qof. Perhaps the main thing that jumps out and bothers me is that the diagonals are all over the place. Lastly, I find letterforms as designed to be a hodgepodge and not well harmonized.

Likewise, I feel that Yod and Vav are overly simplified and would benefit greatly from a treatment that helps these shapes to relate better to their more traditional, calligraphic forms. I feel that Alef is in the same category as my latter examples of construction, some humanizing details can and should be kept to give life to the design so that it does not feel as sterile and rudimentary as it does now. I could have also reduced l, t & y to straight stick forms, but I went with more writerly forms to give the design a greater sense of being informed by the human hand. You can say the same of many letters in the Latin: k, v, w, x, z. For example, look at the Alef: it’s literally 3 straight lines arranged in together. The designer has tried to reduce the forms to something very simple, but I feel that he has gone too far an they no longer have much soul: the design feels very ‘ball-and-stick’ to me, a term that we use in Latin type design to refer to designs that are overly constructed, as if they they were made by piecing geometric balls and sticks together. The proportions feel like they have been made to adhere too strictly with the proportions and rhythm of the Latin, which I feel is probably a mistake to try to do so closely. In looking at the current state of Ben’s design, I do not see the same considerations influencing the design. In a way what I tried to do is to create a type that traces the bones of a traditional book face–the prototypical forms–and treats them with a touch of naïveté that lends the appropriate amount of warmth and character to the design. Additionally, I tried to reduce each letterform to it’s most basic structure while still keeping some details that added warmth and aid in legibility, eg the flick on the outstroke of l adds a bit of personality, but on a functional level it serves to differentiate between I (capital i) and l (lowercase L). To achieve these goals, I wanted to stick fairly close to traditional proportions, but with gently compressed forms.

To start off with, the brief for SSP was to create a clear, simple sanserif typeface that would be pleasing in a user interface framework and would also work in running text on screens. Of course I can share a more in-depth analysis of why I, as the designer of Source Sans, do not feel that the current design is not a good match for SSP.

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