Hängemenge
For my second last birthday my friends got me a hammock and it’s one of the
best gifts I’ve gotten, I love it. I even named my laptop hamac1.
A person close to me coined the word Hängemenge, inspired by how Kugelmugel
sounds. Hängemenge describes the feeling of lying in a hammock or it could
refer to a multitude of hammocks. For some time now I’ve been meaning to design
a font (or rather typeface, as I’ve learned2), where the horizontal bars
in H and A hang like a hammock. Well I finally did it!
The headings on my blog now use my Hängemenge font. For this blog post the heading is editable so you can try it out (though note that for missing glyphs like digits it will fall back to your default sans-serif font). Before my website was using Literata for both headings and body. Now I’m using my font for the headings and for the body I switched to the charming figtree from Erik Kennedy.
I always try to use free and open source software. So when it came to designing a font I tried FontForge and Inkscape. Unfortunately both were rather clunky. I ended up trying the proprietary and Mac-only Glyphs Mini 2 on my work MacBook and have been thoroughly impressed. Glyphs Mini is a joy to use and I bought the 49€ license after the 30 day trial expired. Aside from its UI I also like how its file format is version-control-friendly plain text. For the theory behind type design I can recommend, Designing Type by Karen Cheng.
I still haven’t designed the digits or the lowercase letters. I’m still not too happy with some glyphs and the kerning can surely be improved. But I like it, I think it expresses my personality and makes my website stand out. Somehow releasing an unfinished typeface is easier for me than releasing unfinished software. Working on a typeface has been a very nice change from working on my (unreleased and unfinished) software. I’ve been meaning to blog more … maybe the new look of my text will motivate me. Stay tuned to find out if I manage to release a second blog post this year.