A playful upright monoline script typeface, bursting with fun! Drawn with quite quick strokes, and then carefully refined, Boomville by Mika Melvas is now available from Lost Type.
Single style with built in lettering-like features
Considerations for Knocked out settings
Great for short phrases and logos
Boomville is a bouncy, upright script font. It’s fun, lively, and filled with personality. Drawn with quite quick strokes of a pointed brush pen, this casual script typeface is now available from Lost Type.
I do quite a lot of lettering pieces with different styles and tools. This helps sharpen my calligraphy, drawing, and digital drawing aka vectoring skills—and to test some ideas freely with no pressure.
Sometimes, just to have some fun with letters, and sometimes those tests end up becoming starting points to a new typeface. Sometimes they just end up in the shredder.
If I see something interesting in those sketches, I might have an urge to test out if that could work in a typeface. Usually, though, that small and quite roughly made lettering piece would go through quite a big transformation before ending up as a typeface. It ends up looking totally different than the starting point, but the main idea is still there.
It was the same thing with Boomville; I made a fun-looking, bouncy script lettering piece that said Lingonberry. That became the basis for the typeface. Although it has changed quite a bit, the main characteristics are still there.
When you are designing a script typeface you always have some things where you have to compromise a bit or make some other ways to get what you want.
For example, the connection of o and r. That’s the spot where you have to decide if you want to design your characters so that the connection of those two letters works without any OpenType ligatures or not.
If you want that the connection stroke of the o is upper part of the character you need very short upstroke to r. That of course means that the connection stroke of characters needs to go very high. That may look a bit silly in other letters. So, if you instead want more short connection stroke to other characters you need a longer upstroke to r and then you need to drop your o’s connection also down. So everything affects everything else.
In this case I wanted the o to be distinctive and have this vertical strike through connection stroke. That meant that I needed to do o_r ligature to make that pair of characters work—fortunately, that’s almost always enabled by default in both desktop applications and on the web.
Boomville has visual compensation (or small inktraps) where two strokes join. Without these, there would be a sharp and pointy negative space between them. This change makes the characters look smoother, especially when Boomville is used in negative colors so the connections don’t get stuffed. That’s a small detail that can make a big difference!
Even as you type in a straight line, you get a bouncing baseline effect, just as you might have if this piece was custom-lettered for you.
It’s important to consider quality when evaluating a brush script typeface. Precise kerning, an extensive glyph set to support a wide array of languages—some you might not even know you need to support yet—and carefully drawn curves.
Something you don’t necessarily see before you start using the font in your work is the quality and placement of the nodes, or the tangent points of the vector curves. You need to have the right amount in the right places to ensure the curves are smooth and preserved in print and on screens.
Pay-what-you-want for a Personal Use License of Boomville. This includes the full character set, supporting for over 100 Latin-based languages.
Get a Commercial Use License of Boomville! This reasonably-priced license covers use in commercial applications including logos.
Alternate gylphs in Boomville were only considered after the core glyphs worked together as well as they possibly could. Those fancy variations can’t be the main objective when designing a typeface. I test my fonts a lot when designing them, and as I do, I get these ideas about what alternates could both work well and look nice.
Sometimes my fonts don’t have a single alternate character, and sometimes there are dozens of them. Boomville falls into the latter category: it includes a selection of advanced typographic features. Some of these are enabled automatically and improve stroke connections between glyphs. Others are optional, letting you customise your use of the typeface.
Advanced typographic features are applied automatically to make your script phrases feel convincing—it just works. Customise further using these additional options accessible through the OpenType feature panel in various software, and additionally through the Glyphs panel in Adobe software. On the web, use font-feature-settings
in your CSS or Utility OpenType in your HTML.