Quiet Structure

I love a website with clean lines and a great grid. Actually, I enjoy seeing that in most design. This website for Big Cartel is a great example of that, as it ought to be, since their job is helping artists create websites and shopping carts to sell their product. The design is clean and everything flows together well. It fits the bill for quiet structure.

I was a bit surprised, when I checked it out on my phone, that they don't have a mobile version. They have, however, designed their original site in a way that it works out well on a mobile device. They've kept the content in a fairly narrow space so that it is still very visible when viewing on a mobile device. I wouldn't be surprised if a mobile version weren't far down the road.

Create a Font

I created this font based on the handwriting of a girl named Sara, hence the name Sarasoda. To begin, Sara wrote all the letters, numbers, and symbols. I then took her handwriting and scanned it into my computer. I used Illustrator to trace all of the characters before placing them on the yourfonts.com template. It was time consuming, but I felt it was the best way to have complete control over exact placement of the characters. 


This font is now installed, on my laptop! It's fun to have a totally unique font. I do plan, in the next while, to create the font in FontLab; but yourfonts.com was a quick way to do it, for now. I am hoping to work with the kearning and leading a bit more in FontLab because I had to tweak it, quite a bit, the way it was created.


I chose this particular handwriting because of the unique, yet appealing style of Sara's writing. It is more of a decorative font and wouldn't be appropriate for large blocks of type. It also isn't a traditional "professional" type, so use of it would be for specific purposes and target markets. It provides a lot of fun, light-hearted personality and I believe would appeal more to women and girls than men and boys. 


Because this is a handwritten font, it is definitely sans serif and is quite asymmetrical. From my typography class, we would have classified this type of font as decorative, and it wouldn't fit into the humanist, transitional, or modernist classifications. Decorative fonts are becoming far more common, today.