#simlish font

I've been studying Mandarin for last five months or so, and I've really wanted to make a Chinese Simlish font for awhile, but I wasn't comfortable with it until I learned more about the writing system (my app focuses on vocabulary and conversation). Thankfully, I work in an insane asylum library and we recently added a few books to our collection about learning Chinese, including how to write it, so I finally decided to tackle this project.

Shang Simla is a Chinese-Simlish hybrid font. There are 26 "letter" glyphs (they correspond to the English keyboard), ten numbers and the absolute bare minimum of punctuation since that wasn't really the focus here. Each glyph is a combination of a Chinese character and a Simlish character - some of them are Simlish characters with Chinese radicals added, and others are kind of mashed up.

A few notes:

I had issues exporting the file for this one. Copying all the uppercase glyphs to the lowercase glyphs seem to fix the .OTF, so you can use either and you'll get the same results.

The glyphs are effing huge. I have no idea why, but you'll likely need to use some very small font sizes.

I used the standard Chinese characters for the numbers since Simlish numbers are usually just straight "English" numbers anyway. I ended up using the character for 10 in place of 0 because the Chinese 0 is an insanely complicated character that just wasn't playing nicely with my font tool. Since the 10 gets used in combination with other numbers quite frequently, I decided I was more than okay with it.

This is a pretty rudimentary font and I'm hoping to use it as a base for a more stylized version in the future. My main goal was to see if it could work at all, and I think this was a success in that regard.

If you have any issues with the file, please let me know. It looks empty when you go to install it, but it showed up fine in Photoshop.

Attribution is appreciated, and I’d love to see your projects if you use it! Please do not use for commercial purposes or redistribute the font itself.

All right! Out into the wild with ya:

DOWNLOAD (SFS) OTF format

These simlish fonts are not perfect : the spacing is sometimes quite irregular but I did my best. All these fonts were made by modifying existing free fonts. The fonts I used as base are also linked, in case you want to mix them with the simlish ones for a more cohesive look. 

—————————— Simlish Barbaro —————————

I made this font to try and replicate the fonts from some victorian and edwardian ads, so it would be most appropriate for those periods.

Get the base font here

——————— Simlish Boecklins Universe ———————

I just needed an Art Nouveau font so here it is. It works for the 1890s, the edwardian era but also the 60s and 70s since there was a big Art Nouveau revival (in print mostly), it fitted the whole psychedelic aesthetic.

Get the base font here

———————— Simlish Antonio Bold —————————

This font was also inspired by some victorian ads. It works well for the 19th century, especially in all caps, and in lower case it’s very versatile, it could work anywhere in the 20th and 21th century really. 

Get the base font here

————————— Simlish Manbow ——————————

Obviously I also needed an Art Déco font so here you go. Perfect for the 20s and especially the 30s !

Get the base font here

 ———————————————————————————

Download : dropbox — simfileshare

I really wanted to try my hand at a gothic Simlish font, and man, did this project cure that desire. 😫 Nevermore (named, of course, for EAP's The Raven) is definitely a display font; there are no lowercase letters or numbers. I might add numbers in the future if I can gin up the motivation to work on this one again.

The kerning on this one is pretty uniform, but I do suggest the usual manual edits if possible.

Attribution is appreciated, and I’d love to see your projects if you use it! Please do not use for commercial purposes or redistribute the font itself.

DOWNLOAD (SFS) OpenType format + preview images.

Runcible Spoon is a serif font designed for display and copy. It comes in uppercase and lowercase, plus numbers, lots of symbols and three alternative ligatures (more about that below). I wanted to design something a little rustic and a little whimsical, but still clean.

Alternative Glyphs --------------------------------------------------------------

Runcible Spoon has three alternative glyphs for these combinations (you can see the examples just above): rq, rg, rp

You can use these alternative glyphs with: | = rq, \ = rg, / = rp

I kerned this one until I could kern no more; it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good. Manual kerning is always recommended if possible. :)

Attribution is appreciated, and I’d love to see your projects if you use it! Please do not use for commercial purposes or redistribute the font itself.

DOWNLOAD (SFS) OpenType format + preview images.

Lots of love, Spacey