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Swoop there it is

I’ve been doing some work lately on a “real” italic for News Cycle.  The original typeface (News Gothic) really only had a slanted-roman italic; I’m trying to produce something nicer that still work well with the upright.

The latest thing I’ve been playing with on this front is the out-strokes on vertical stems of the lower-case letters.  News Cycle is plain enough that capital “I” and lowercase “l’ look pretty similar, so I tried adding a bit of swoop at the bottom of the italic “l”.  Obviously this departs a bit from the construction of the regular, so I’m not sure it will stay.  But the curve is borrowed from the “t” and “f” — hopefully I can make it look harmonious and judge the results on merit, not on the lousy implementation.

What I’m less certain of is whether the same approach improves other characters with right-side stems: “a” “d” “n” “m” “u” and “i”….  So I started with “a” and “d” to see where that went; “a” needs to look really good, and I don’t want it to blend into the “g”….

Here are some samples — the first has no swoop tail, the second has a swoop copied (in reduced form) from “l”, and the third has the same swoop chopped off.  Small:

no-tail-small

long-tail-small

cut-tail-small

 

Medium:

no-tail-med

long-tail-med

cut-tail-med

 

Large:

no-tail-big

longtail-a-big

cut-tail-big

 

Even after inserting these images, I think I don’t like any of the options.  The “long” swoop tail is obviously *too* long, but it needs to be reduced, not just cut-off as it is on the third samples.

What do you think?