ea. And that can only be judged in the context of, say half or more of the alphabet (eg hamburgerfontsiv). Then you can ask: was this a good design idea? Should it be changed, or is some of the execution flawed that I should fix before going on? If some characters are flawed, how?
I don't work impulsively.
I would stare at the letter for a moment, then I'd go away and do something else -- Returning eventually, possibly with a fresh perspective.
p.s. As you are troubled by the 4, I should say: numbers follow different rules than the latin alphabet, but they also have to work together with the alphabet, so they're a special challenge. Perhaps others can be more helpful with general guidelines, but for a start: study a variety of numbers styles and their associated alphabets.
What if you're just making a single glyph and thus have nothing to compare it to? I just think this is an interesting question. Kind of like, if you are at a T intersection somewhere, and are completely lost, and have no landmarks to go by, do you turn right or left? There's no correct answer, which is why I think it is so interesting. I wasn't really looking for help with anything in particular, but I do appreciate it.
You wait for another car and follow it.
Not a bad solution.
Then one day, the boy was out hunting english script fraction denominators in the woods, when suddenly a huge black wolf with long white descenders leaped from an over-hanging ligature...
Hrant: your "structure" might be understood as "expanded skeleton"
Which would be a mistake. If I'd meant skeleton, I would have said skeleton. What I am talking about might be considered the opposite of an expanded skeleton: a perceptual shape within the black. It is easy to see how this shape is perceptually subject to the relationship of opposing outlines, without falling back on a notion of these as expansions of a skeleton. As I've pointed out in the past, Legato possesses a strong sense of structure that is not reducible to a skeleton through manipulation of the outlines, which would be the case for skeleton expansion (or stroking).
To me it all boils down to the "total" black/white border
It cannot boil down to that in the case of text type at typical sizes, because at those sizes we don't perceive the borders, we perceive the shapes.
Agreed - I meant in terms of definition/design, not perception.