Building the Alphabet:
UPPERCASE part 4

In the previous post I started the core characters with diagonals: “N, M, A, V” and “W”. This week I finished up “K, X, Y” and “Z”—the rest of the characters containing diagonal strokes.

Uppercase K

“K” is going to have similar negative space to “N” and be just slightly narrower than “H”, so those were the glyphs I compared it to as I was drawing. The central joint of the “K” is going to be just a bit higher than center, like the crossbar of “H”.

Sometimes the leg of the “K” will join at the stem with the base of the arm. This is the way I noticed it being drawn most of the time when I researched protest signs for this font. Other times, the leg will join with the arm just above where the arm joins the stem. In this case, the joint with the stem is lower than center.

The only other design feature of note for “K” is that—for this font anyway—the leg curves down rather than going straight. This was a common feature of both “K” and “R” that I noticed in my initial research.

Uppercase X, Y, Z

I’m going to breeze over “X” and “Z” because they are drawn in essentially the same way as their lowercase counterparts.

The “Y” is a little different, as I drew it in three parts: diagonal downstroke on the left, diagonal downstrok on the right joining the first at the bottom, followed by a third downstroke from the vertex of the first two strokes down to the baseline.

“Y” is similar in width to “V”.

Up Next

My schedule says I’m doing “B, P, R” and “D” next. These are the characters with combinations of verticals and curves. I always find the comparison between “B, P” and “R” to be interesting. Good times ahead!