Hellebore is a font that I designed over 3 months. I wanted to make a slightly chunky, transitional serif text font. I tried to make it more legible, specifically for dyslexia; research shows that the aspects that make a font more legible are a heavier baseline that grounds the characters, and non-flipped letterforms (e.g., d and b should look different from each other when flipped.)
Below are process images of the broadside I designed for my final font.
Here is an example of the changes in design the font went through, with the left column being an early draft and the right the final draft. By testing my letterforms at different sizes I could see how the contrast between thick and thin strokes held up, as well as how legible the counterspace remained at small sizes. There was a further balancing act to make each letter match the rest in its visual weight; the lowercase and uppercase also had to feel cohesive in design and weight. Once the letters, ligatures, numbers, and punctuation were designed, the font had to be spaced properly.
