The swashes in WeGo Serif also have smart OpenType settings which auto-magically choose the best swash combinations on the fly.

Read more about the design process here:

lettermatic.com/custom/fetch...

New Work: Fonts for Fetch. 🔡 🐕 🔠

We made a custom type system comprised of a workhorse sans and friendly serif for one of the most popular shopping apps in the USA. Read the full case study here:

lettermatic.com/custom/fetch...

I think there is something to be said about the word ‘simple.’ I sense that many designers share this ambition to make their work ‘simple to perceive.’ Easy to understand.

One way to visualize the importance of counterforms is a 'blur test.' Adrian Frutiger did tests like this in the 1970s when designing his eponymous typeface (originally for a French airport). See how one set of drawings is easier to distinguish, in these harsh conditions of blur?

If so, perhaps the reason was the disambiguation of counterforms. The less similar the 'c' counterform is to an 'o' counterform, the faster it may be discovered in context. Here's how that detail is handled in Really Sans.

Many typefaces have a rational construction that tries to make the counterforms as similar (in their shape) to each other as possible. This makes rational sense, but it turns out that it doesn’t produce the most pleasant result for reading.

A balanced word will typically be made of letters where the counterforms are approximately equal in their overall mass or volume. I've sometimes pictured it as candle wax; if I melted these counters down, would they each be about the same amount of wax?

By drawing different counter shapes, I can make many letters appear without changing the positive shape at all. This is shown here to illustrate the importance of the counterforms, and how they impact our perception of letter shapes.

Using the same positive shape, I can subtract some counterforms and turn it into a lowercase 'a.'

It turns out subtraction is the quickest way. It's relatively simple; subtracting these two negative 'counterforms' or 'counters' from our positive shape has made this an 's.' Our brain wants to see the 's' here, based on the previous reading we've done in our lives.