Sweep the Leg
With much excitement, I’ve submitted another bot to font-bot.com. Futura did a great job, especially being my first font bot. He won his first battle and was put into the battle of champions. He went 3 rounds until he lost to the almost undefeatable Big-Axe. Big-Axe would probably still be winning right now if it weren’t for people just getting bored of him.
I created my new bot along side my friend at work, Jose. I showed him Futura and he loved the idea of font bots. So we decided we would make one together: him coming up with an idea for it and me drawing him up. After a few days of brainstorming, Jose decided on a bot based on the original Karate Kid.
After figuring out the theme, we had to decide on a name. My roommate thought of using the typeface, Khmer MN, and calling him the Khmerate Kid. We thought it was decent enough so I started fleshing the kid out with that name. Soon we accepted the face that both the name and my drawing were…ok.
We went back to the drawing board but couldn’t come up with anything that good. Finally, my other co-worker, Duc, came up with an absolutely brilliant idea. We could name the bot after the Karate Kid himself: Daniel. For those who haven’t seen the movie, the main character’s teacher always calls him Daniel San, a sign of respect in Japanese language. With “San” and the typographicly common Latin word “Sans,” meaning without, being so similar, we knew we had a winner.
With a new name and the lessons I learned from trying to make my robot the first time, I started working on Daniel Sans from scratch. I took ideas of how to use the letterforms from some of my favorite robots: Big Axe andHelbotica. They played around different sizes of the letters to create more weight contrast on their robots. For example, Helbotica uses large letters (around 80pt) to create the main infrastructure while using the small ones (9pt) for the small details.
I submitted Daniel Sans to font-bot.com this morning. Hopefully he’s allowed to compete and takes down a bunch of bots.
You know what, all of a sudden I feel like Mr. Miyagi. I trained my font bot. Taught him how to “wax on, wax off.” Now he’s ready to beat the bad guy with his killer crane kick. Wish him luck and vote for him!
