How could you create a shorthand?

There exist compilations where the author comments on pros and cons, giving his view on what principles are at work. But so far i haven't come across a do it yourself kit. I have made numerous shorthands in very diverse styles. I would describe my approach constraints driven, which is another way to say: If you simplify one aspect another expands in complexity, but that's the beauty of creation. My creations don't compete against each other, they are all 'perfect' in the sense i wanted them and in others not... :-)

Usually the stroke set is very simple )\|/(, strokes can go up or down, so you want to tilt the strokes (already 10 characters, 5 one way, 5 the other). One important question is, do you want to expand your set by different sizes or different boldness or by attaching loops and hooks (approach: gregg vs pitman vs gabelsberger). You may even be very radical and say you don't care for t,d thats one char same as b,p. So you reduce the need for different chars, but maybe you dot the char, when it is in its non frequent state. The pairing i did here is also often used in conjunction with size or boldness, to make it easier for the people to learn the alphabet, but it may slow down your script!

If you haven't attached loops and hooks (curve attached to the previous or next stroke in direction of that letter) you can give them a function: usually vowels or liquids (r,l,v,w those are characters that follow plosives a lot (r,l) or vowels(v,w). It depends whether you have chosen to give the space you write on, usually a line in a notebook and the relative placement some meaning or not. Some say above the line adds +r to the written consonant, through the line adds +l, or above the line adds +a, well you get the idea...

Vowels are often used for pronouns, when you chose loops and hooks for them, great for phrasing (small meaningful word structures like a predicat S-V-negation?). Negation is often an N or a T (or both), meaning you can think of letters that join or slur over two signs (ex. in gregg '_/' represents 'nt' so you can write one big bow of a stroke for nt...)

If you have chosen your constraints you start selectioning and picking only the best characters, those that connect most graceful with the following.

Does your script have to be more or less like normal written stuff, lineal? Then you better look that up and downstrokes are well proportioned - tip:keep s and t in different directions.

scientific approach helps with the selection

• sound occurance helps to decide which sound gets the best letters (tip: prefer curved ones)
• maybe you care about character n-grams: to be or (bigrams) not (trigram) helps to design smooth joins between letters
• or word n-grams
• or collocates

concerning vowels: You may consider how to represent diphthongs, especially when you chose hooks and circles for vowels, so you can easely make different outlines for 'cut' or 'cute'. In english the so called long vowels are diphthongs too of course. Depending on how important vowels are in your oppinion you can pair them like [e,i] along with all the schwa forms (lazy vowels) in that color. [a,ey], [o,ou,u] or you can decide to only write diphthongs and you choose to omit all normal vowels. That way you would only write longvowels and diphtongs, which is not a bad choice.

Happy constructing!