Attor's hand

[Paul Czege]

Matt Gwinn made quite an interesting suggestion last week related to the eventual layout and presentation of My Life with Master: that the game text be enhanced by the presence of marginalia and commentary as if the document were hand annotated by a fictional Master. I'm not sure whether I have the creative writing skill necessary to do justice to the idea, but it's so damn clever that I pretty much can't help but give it serious consideration.

So I've been messing around, downloading various handwriting fonts, trying to find one that might be suitably dysfunctional in style and character as to be the handwriting of a Master such as the most renowned actor of his generation, Attor Fusae (my variant on Mike's suggested "Attor Fuseau"). I turned up maybe a dozen potential fonts, and narrowed it down http://www.123.net/~czege/attorshand.jpg">to four. What do you think, which one is the most Master-like in your estimation? Note that only two of the fonts include capital letters, and because of line weight disparities, I've haven't been satisfied with my efforts to use the capitals from the fonts that have them with the lowercase letters of the fonts that lack them. (Any advice in this regard would also be appreciated).

Paul

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Paul,

I like the second one best. The last two seem too modern to me and the first seems too formal, not annotation-like enough.

Best,
Ron

[Blake Hutchins]

Paul,

I like the third.  It's a heavier line weight, which fits my knee-jerk take on obsessive, Van Gogh-like personalities.  Four is too straight up and down and neat.  Also, four's general width looks too uniform, too square.  The ascenders and descenders aren't terribly pronounced, which is suggestive of a personality more concerned with practical, day-to-day matters than bringing life to the clockwork-packed corpse in the laboratory.  Two is a lighter line weight, and looks a tad too clean to my eye.  I would suggest something with a touch of the erratic, but obviously not at the cost of legibility.  I agree with Ron about the feel of number one.

Best,

Blake

[Mike Holmes]

This is just to say that I agree with Blake's assessments. I wouldn't have noted the details he did, but the effect on me is what he suggests.

Actually, I was hoping for something even a little more chaotic. Like the notebooks from Myst.

Mike

[Paul Czege]

I like the third...fits my knee-jerk take on obsessive

Yeah...I've been leaning toward the third one myself. I like how some of the letters, like the g and f, slant left and the majority slant right. It strikes me as a very Master-like handwriting trait. If you're curious, the name of the font is violation. The only problem I have is that it's one that doesn't have capital letters, and with the heavier line weight I can't achieve satisfying results substituting capitals from, say, the fourth one.

Paul