I’m excited to announce that I’m getting close to releasing the next version of the Hollywood Star font, which it going to become its first major update since 2020.
During these four years I’ve been taking a series of daring (yet gentle) steps aside from the original design of the typeface, giving myself more creative freedom and hoping to bring more individuality to the font.
First and foremost, I retraced and recreated all the letters I photographed during the 2019-2020 fieldwork, this time including newly discovered variations.
Secondly, I designed characters that were missing, including lowercase, numerals, non-Latin, and many more.
And finally, I designed an extensive set of Cyrillic characters which, along with diactrics, increased the number of supported languages has up to 215.
The original letters from the first release (both Rugged and Clean sets) are preserved in the character set and also available as alternatives.
In summary, there were created:
- Latin lowercase
- Basic Greek (uppercase)
- Full set of Cyrillic
- Greek uppercase
- Ligatures
- Punctuation
- Symbols: currencies, math, arrows, geometry, etc.
- Combining and modifying marks
- Numbers, including small figures
- Walk of Fame artistic category icons
I have a plan to release the font no later than October 2024, with the next two major tasks coming up: fixing the kerning, and finding a foundry.
Update from 2025-01-06: I failed to release the font in 2024 because I haven’t found a distrubutor. Yet I’m considering selling it directly from my own shop. Stay tuned!
Although there’s still a lot of work to be done, I’m pretty happy with how the font is turning out. At least I haven’t made many changes in the last few months, and to my eye the font looks balanced. I’m curious to find out what others would say.