Piacevoli – New font!

I’m finally getting back into the swing of things over here with the release of Piacevoli: a somewhat-fancy, somewhat-casual classically-inclined script typeface. That’s a lot of descriptors for a small font like this!

The creation process for this font started out somewhat along the same lines as the process I described for the release of Enter Command, in that the initial basis of the design is based on what I saw in a game. Unlike Enter Command, where I extrapolated from and built off of something with solid proportions, Piacevoli… not so much.

Piacevoli was inspired by the in-game text for Shrek 2: Beg for Mercy! on Game Boy Advance. 🙂 (For the record, I’ve never played this game and don’t plan to.)

When I saw the game text I thought it had a nice overall feel… but a bit rough, to put it nicely. The uppercase letters are thicker/heavier to a distracting degree, the letter spacing feels off, the x-height is inconsistent. Some characters, like that uppercase G, are just plain ugly. I could see that the underlying style was something that could make a nice font, but this one? Not quite there yet.

I decided to do my own re-imagining of the font. Everything was basically redrawn from scratch; square corners were rounded, curves were tweaked, serifs starting characters were dropped to give things a more natural script look. I looked at various handwriting samples to take many characters in new directions. In the end my design is significantly different than the one used in the game, and it’s more like they share a common ancestor. I’m quite happy with it! Here is the final alphabet:

Although I probably based things more off of general rules of calligraphy/samples of classic script, because the original inspiration for this font was the game, I wanted to reference that in the name. The box art (and most of the screenshots I found) features Puss in Boots so I named the font after Le piacevoli notti, a collection of short stories by Giovanni Francesco Straparola that contains one of the first published versions of the fairy tale that eventually became as Puss in Boots.

Finally, a few notes unrelated to this font release:

  1. FontEndDev.com has been updated with new styles as of December 2019! If your device has display settings for a dark mode (and you have dark mode selected) and your browser supports prefers-color-scheme, the site will appear in dark mode. Font preview images that are normally black on white will appear inverted (color images remain unchanged).
  2. FontEndDev.com has been updated with new features as of January 2020! I’ve reorganized some things behind the scenes so that the Fonts page (where all the fonts are listed) includes a menu to sort fonts by classification (Decorative, Sans Serif, Script, Serif) and style.
  3. Shortly after the site update in January, I was excited to get down to font creation again – when I suffered catastrophic data loss. Luckily none of my in-progress typeface files were affected, however, it was a huge setback at my job and for other creative projects I was working on. That is why this font release announcement is technically coming a day late, and why new releases will continue to be sporadic as I continue to play catch-up for various deadlines.

As always, if you’re interested in supporting my work & the creation of more pixel fonts licensed under CC, I have set up a Ko-fi page for Font End Dev and appreciate any contributions. 🙂

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