About

The story of Abscissa:

One day I was sitting in front of my computer with Fontographer running. I had no new font for the week. So I sat there searching my brain for any sort of inspiration, any at all. None came. Eventually ennui set in and I started playing around with some of Fontographer’s features.

I opened up its freehand draw tool and started to doodle in a blank A glyph. Soon I realized you could make the tips of the letters you drew square or rounded. I changed that a few times and experimented with the results. Rounded was unpleasant somehow so I set it to square. I wrote with the mouse in the blank glyph “I have no inspiration”. The letters I had just created looked really good … and then, bam! Inspiration came.

I went throught each glyph, drawing in a letter the same way I had before. After each was done and the extended characters were created, Abscissa was born.

By definition, an abscissa is “the coordinate representing the position of a point along a line perpendicular to the y-axis in a plane Cartesian coordinate system” (the definition came from dictionary.com). Just for the record, I don’t know what that means.