New treble clef

Music notation symbols, fonts, font sources and font creation, SmuFL.
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Dan Kreider
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Joined: 24 Feb 2020, 19:59

New treble clef

Post by Dan Kreider »

Here's my first attempt at a treble clef (SVG here).

Image

Feedback welcome. Be nice; this is hard. Yes, I know it looks nothing like a conventional clef...

My goal is ultimately to harmonize it with Trinite. For starters I'm just trying to make it look respectable.

Thanks!
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NorFonts
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Re: New treble clef

Post by NorFonts »

Nice! looks like a vintage clef, I see your bass clef there, even the 8th note rest, I also see the Alto clef there :-) You can extract them from the same glyph you designed.
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Dan Kreider
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Re: New treble clef

Post by Dan Kreider »

Thanks. Here it is on the staff. I think it's a bit too wispy, for one thing.

Image
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Dan Kreider
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Re: New treble clef

Post by Dan Kreider »

The smaller (default) noteheads seem to fit better:

Image
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benwiggy
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Re: New treble clef

Post by benwiggy »

Dan Kreider wrote: 15 Apr 2021, 13:07
My goal is ultimately to harmonize it with Trinite.
That's a nice font. I looked at buying it, but £374.16 per weight, or the complete set discounted to £1,867.93 is a little out of my range.

Font designers gotta eat, but still....

As for your clef: really interesting. It reminds me (and this is meant in a good way) of a style of animated cartoons in the late 50s/early 60s.
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Dan Kreider
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Re: New treble clef

Post by Dan Kreider »

benwiggy wrote: 15 Apr 2021, 18:10 As for your clef: really interesting. It reminds me (and this is meant in a good way) of a style of animated cartoons in the late 50s/early 60s.
Ha! Well, not quite what I was going for, but I'll take it.
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tisimst
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Re: New treble clef

Post by tisimst »

Dan, you are endeavoring to do something even more challenging than most attempt. When staying within the world of music symbols, you can take a lot of liberties when it comes to creating a cohesive design because most symbols don't have a lot of similarities. However, when trying to match up to a text font, which has A LOT of similarities, you're going to have to synthesize music symbols a bit differently.

I recommend pulling curves/features from the text glyphs themselves with minor modifications as a starting point paying careful attention to thick & thin. Since text on a music score tends to be sized such that the x-height is roughly a single staff space, this makes for a pretty small thick/thin ratio to base music glyphs off of. Thus, I'd use the BOLD version of Trinite as more of a design guide for the treble clef since it also has a higher contrast between thick & thin, probably for other music symbols, too.

Here are some stylistic examples I had a small hand in, but mostly designed by a friend of mine, Giovanni Murolo. One sample is synthesized to work well with Bodoni, a high contrast serif font with a lot of finesse, and the other with Akzidenz Grotesk, a low contrast sans serif font that uses simple, blocky shapes. He did a great job, but I know it was quite the challenge for him. He borrowed features quite heavily from glyphs in the text font and I think they turned out great.

I hope you continue working on this! You're off to a fantastic start and hopefully the samples below give you some inspiration.
MusicBodoni-1.0-1953-beethoven.png
MusicBodoni-1.0-1953-beethoven.png (80.14 KiB) Viewed 4562 times
MusicalAkzidenz-1.0-1953-beethoven.png
MusicalAkzidenz-1.0-1953-beethoven.png (70.9 KiB) Viewed 4562 times
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Dan Kreider
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Re: New treble clef

Post by Dan Kreider »

Thanks Abraham, that’s really helpful.
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