Hoping to find a font who’s numbers will go nicely with this logo, I need to add years to banners for it and would like to find numbers that go with it. Looking mostly at the slight curve in places like the top line of the A and other similar places. The overall curve isn’t as important since the curved ones I found didn’t “feel” right. Most I found were either a bit too ornate or a bit too whimsical for the job, so I’m asking the Experts!
You could try Danger Girl Regular, if you are just looking for numbers. The logo is hand-drawn from what I could find.
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Thanks! Will give it a look.
The logo is from the 1920s so it’s definitely hand drawn. That’s why I just asked for something that kinda looks like it would work and be similar.
I kept finding things similar, but the differences clashed rather starkly. I may have to finally learn to use Fontlab Studio! Never was any good at vector art - I’m a left handed dyslexic and those beerier contraptions are something I never “got a handle on”
I have version 4 on an old laptop. No idea where it is or if it still works, but it’s there! This is why I archive my old ‘puters; Old Software still works perfectly well on old hardware and will only “age out” when the hardware dies and cannot be replaced (even backed up installers + serials on external drives).
Gonna have to tweak my first font! I only ever used it to trace bitmaps and make “special” characters for “certain” clients. Finally gonna put it to it’s intended purpose 
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Well, this was interesting.
Anyone ever hear of https://www.mixfont.com/ ?
I showed it the logo and it designed a font based on it.
Their license says we can share the fonts it makes (even sell them) so it was an interesting free alternative (could not find that old laptop!).
Here’s a pic with the original logo, a word from the font the website created, a date from the mixfont creation and and my first effort at getting something similar from asking ai to create numerals zero through nine in a similar style as the logo (in that order). I cut and pasted the images to make a year. The font is easier.
So… what do people think of this mixfont site? Is there good reason to avoid it? That sort of thing usually has drawbacks. Fortunately I am working with the owners of this logo, so I’ll offer them the font if they want it, but I can see this sort of thing being … questionable?
I’d be very careful about offering anything like that on a commercial basis. Like anything AI-generated, it is very unlikely to be copyright-able. AI for client work is a very dark and murky swamp to be swimming in.
Agreed! As I said, the only reason I was comfortable using it for this job is that it’s a very old logo and the copyright holder of the logo is not only aware of what is happening, they are peripherally involved in the project.
I’d never try to sell anything from that place and I only offered the font to the copyright holder (free of course). They, surprisingly, didn’t want it.
I’ll keep the font with the archive of stuff used for this project, but doubt it will ever get used after this is done unless they want more updates.
I am very much against nearly all ai stuff, but am in a desperate financial situation and needed to get this part of the job moving. I must admit, it did a good job. But I’m very vocal around here about my anti-ai stance because it is so bad for the environment that it may literally kill people soon, and how horrible I feel on these rare occasions when I need to resort to it. One or two other times so far, and I feel like a hypocrite when I do it… but I lost my job as a Chemist, can’t find work in my field, plus the woman I love needs medical treatment and, as I said after I first used it, I guess I really would kill for her!
I’d be interested to see how it fairs in terms of technical (and visual) integrity. I am cynical that it will get anywhere close to achieving the optical compensations required in pretty much every aspect of designing a coherent type family. Still, as AI gets more sophisticated, who knows…
It did a surprisingly good job, but only because I had low expectations.
The image with yellow text above shows the Awake! logo from a scan and a typed out Asleep! logo from the font, just to show what it did. I did have to manually adjust some spacing (leading/kerning) and baseline stuff (the numbers varied widely on baseline and had to be rotated in some cases so they look right) (the 1947 with no outline is from the font and the whole reason for the effort - I didn’t need any letters or special characters, but I needed 0 through 9 in a close style and I think the numbers look, if not work (without manual tweaks), just fine.
Bottom line is that it did acceptable work and everyone involved thinks the numbers work as intended.
What would you be interested in seeing? A character map? The actual font? I’ll sell it to you for 87 Million dollars! 
Or you can have a free copy if you want to just see the output on your own system. I wasn’t told not to share it by the copyright holder (I can ask though), but he knows early issues are public domain now (but I have no idea how derivative works of public domain items work if there are later issues with the same logo that are not public domain!). I would say if you want it for that we can call it “for evaluation purposes” and include no commercial use stuffs.
Depending on the job at hand, like yours, an AI-generated font might be an acceptable solution. It might even serve as a starting point for refinement.
However, current AI models still don’t create professional-quality typography, even though they’re getting better at it all the time. For example, here’s the “s” from “Asleep,” with some awfully crude outlines and clunky curves. I don’t want to dismiss it, though, since the generated font produced what you needed.
Absolutely right! And I hope ai never gets good enough to do it all. Since I only needed the numbers the additional characters were a bonus, so naturally I got a little silly playing with it.
Since @sprout was curious, this may show what it did. The erratic placing and alignment of glyphs is clear from this image. I just opened my good old Photoshop CS6 and typed out every character. I actually was surprised it wasn’t quick and easy to find a tool that would export every character in a font like this or in the character map format seen in font generators. That may be something for one of our coders to think about. Sounds like it could be useful, but don’t expect me to buy one if you make it! I’m broke.
Also looks like many special characters were not created and it used some default font for them.
Anyway… The entire font:
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Good news is you’re only typesetting four digits, so you can afford to be picky — and that takes pressure off finding one perfect font.
The “Awake!” lettering is a heavy hand-drawn brush style with that '60s/'70s poster feel: fat strokes, a slight bounce, pointed terminals. Two things to match: stroke weight and era.
Weight first — those letters are ultra-bold, so numerals from a regular or medium font will look anemic next to them on a banner. Test candidates at actual banner size, not zoomed in; a digit that looks fine at 200px can disappear at 20 feet.
For feel, look at the fat, soft '70s display faces rather than scripts — the rounded Cooper Black–style faces pair surprisingly well with brush lettering like this, because the chunky stroke and round terminals echo the hand-drawn look without competing with it. Shrikhand is a free one in that family whose numerals have the same chunky bounce. Set a few year strings side by side and squint: the right one will read as “same family” at a glance.
One more trick since you only need ten glyphs: if you find a font where you love everything except one digit (usually the 2 or 7), just redraw or tweak that one digit in a vector editor instead of rejecting the whole font. On a banner, nobody will know.
We’re talking about this in the wrong thread - I just linked to the other thread for reference. We can move this talk there, or maybe a moderator can move the posts there so we don’t distract from the topic at hand, but I’ll be brief. I’m a left handed dyslexic and never could “get a handle” on those beerzier curve manipulators. We’re done with that part of the job now and it all worked out well. But thanks for the thoughts!
Done. Thanks for noticing.
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Late to this, and Rodak’s numbers problem is already solved, so just on the quality discussion above: the enlarged s that Just-B posted is exactly where generated fonts show themselves. The outlines are only half the story. What a generator cannot give you is the spacing logic, the sidebearings and the optical compensation sprout mentioned, because those live in decisions made across the whole character set, not inside one glyph. For a single word, or a string of digits that mostly sits alone, it can pass. The moment the same face has to set three lines of text, the uneven colour gives it away. I work with text tooling myself, mostly Unicode styled text, a different corner of the same problem, and the pattern there is identical: output built for one purpose looks fine until it has to behave like a system. Glad the job landed where it needed to, Rodak.
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@irislabs ; You definitely hit on the points that make this a fun idea and a useful tool for a starting point, but which we all agree is not up tp professional level.
I was very lucky that it got what I needed done with no major issues for my needs in this one job.
The leading/kerning is almost nonexistent it is so bad (see the typed out alphabet and how inconsistent it is) and even with the characters that numerical worked for the job I had to type each number on it’s own layer and translate/rotate to make it usable. However, I have to admit my vector art skills are so bad that I could not have gotten the job done without it’s help.
That’s all ai should ever be used for! Just a helping hand when you get stuck.
Too many people just go straight to it for entire jobs and I find that … offensive.
Thanks for the insights.