My first venture into the world of type design began on graph paper and ended with hobbits. I knew I wanted to design a fully usable and versatile serif face, but that was about as far as I had gotten when I was introduced to Robofont and told to have at it. I spent loads of time (probably far more than was actually necessary) sketching, thinking, researching and, finally, crossed that threshold from pencil to mouse. Delving into teaching myself a new program while my love of putting pencil to paper tugged in the opposite direction was a tad grueling in the beginning, but thankfully the trial and error eventually paid off (as is true with most things, really). By scouring various typefaces across a multitude of type foundaries for serif advice, how the intersections of a two-story "a" might look, and how on earth a two-story "g" is all pieced together, Grapefroot came to be. The lowercase "g" was actually the one letter which I could not get off my mind (which brought me to the realization that my face should really start with one), and went through many iterations before finally settling into its squishy, bouncy final form.
My experience as a whole with this maiden voyage into designing a type face is nicely summed up in a "grapefruit;" round, friendly-looking, but a tad bitter. This is not to say, of course, that I will never again set sail into Robofont or similar programs (and I could, in fact, spend another six months developing this 10-week typeface), but the bumpy road that lead to its existence reiterated to me that satisfaction and good design is in the details, and never to take that for granted.
