Learn Type Design

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the ATypI 2011, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke at ATypI on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect its because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately – or post a comment!

Thomas Phinney: TSI: Type Scene Investigations

1. Evil step mother

An old guy married in late life, they had an ‘estate’ near Monterey CA, and without a will the evil stepmother would get 1/3, but she tied up the estate by rotating lawyers and spending it. There was a $300,000 suburban house, not so big, and after years she ran out of delay tactics…. and then found a will!

Set in Times, he leaves $1 to each kid, and I was brought in to say what the typeface was EXACTLY. I compared Times, Times New Roman, and there are a few glyphs with big differences, the cap S in TNR has vertical terminal cuts, Times has slanted ones, and the ‘F’ is much wider.

TNR was in Windows 3.1, a few years to late for a 1983 will, but I couldn’t be sure when it was first published. So I looked at the PRINTING with a microscope.

Inkjets ‘bleed’ along the paper grain, and speckles like a photocopier, whereas offset is very smooth. The only inkjet was a HP with 180dpi, and when you see its a 300 DPI inkject, that is game over.

There were other things, the wording of the will, but I showed the enlargements to the judge in the will contestation. I wasn’t cross examined, it was too damanging, so the will was tossed out. The house was sold, the estate wound down and kids got money (less legal fees…) and the evil step mother fled the law! There’s still a warrant for their arrest; if they get a speeding ticket or something then they may get busted, but its easy to find her online

2. Rabbi

A Rabbi who was very social, a high powered guy, he blessed the US House of Representatives, but yet he didn’t seen to know the Torah very well. Some people became suspicious. He brought the community together, but on matters of doctrine and faith he sometimes seemed less knowledgable.

He was pressured to produced his educational certificates, and being a Rabbi is more fluid than a priest, the hierarchy is different, but you have to go to Rabbinial school and you get a certificate. He produced a scan of a fax of something. He claimed the original, his ex wife had it, and all he could get from her was a fax. Sure. But the sharp eyed congregation said it looked funny. This is dated 1968, and its from a school that burned down! So you couldn’t verify it upstream.

But you could look at the type!

Someone thought it was Lucida Calligrpahy. I looked more closely and its Monotype Corsiva. That’s a computer font, not released until some 20 years after 1968.

Most of the people in the community were against her, but the idea had spread and while there was no court case, eventually he moved on and is no longer a public figure.

3. Presidential Plot

The CBS/Killian memoes, said to date from the 1972/3, when G W Bush was in the National Guard and didn’t go to Vietnam. These memoes were shown on CBS’ “60 minutes” and could have made him look bad.

But they were not authentic!

Dated 01 August 1973. The letterforms were degraded a lot to be conclusive. A low res scan of a fax. The originals were burned…

But I looked at the RELATIVE line endings; unless fonts are made to have the same metrics 100%, its like a “FONT FINGERPRINT” – so you can overlay a reproduction using Times New Roman, and the line endings are dead on. Thats pretty convincing.

People said, where are the widths from anyway; could a proportional spacing type writer of that time do it? There was one, and some low end type setting devices – but people REALLY wanted them to be real. The IBM Selectric COMPOSER? Used in a national guard secretarial pool? It has proportional fonts, but htey all use the same widths. The ‘i’ is always the same. The 9 unit system was also very crude compared to Monotype’s 18 unit system. But I built a computer font that used the metrics system, and consistently there were details that were up to a full glyph width offset.

I offered then and toady $1,000 if you can show this isn’t true

The credibility damage was severe, Rather had to retire early from CBS. A few people think they are real today, and a Professor Hailey got access to better copies and proved it was not Times New Roman – but Times Roman!

This didn’t effect the GWB re-election.

4. Special Sack

John ‘Snowshoe’ Thompson. Back in the days mail was posted very slowly. They found a bag in an antique shop, they thought it might have been in a museum; and it has a label on it with text about it being presented by some President of something…. and they asked me to date the label, but, I figured the museum would have put it on.

Torben Wilhelmsen: Designer’s update: Type, design and automated layout

This is about integrating type and design through templates into automated lage layouts for multi platform publishing, such as print magazines and blogs on computers, tablets and mobiles.

The print magazine is used by the hand, and in the future, we dont know what will happen.

Speed is a sense of how often new things come along. It took me 9-10 years to get a PC after they came out, 5 years to get online after I could, and a couple years to get a smartphone, a few months to get a tablet when they came out. Its 5 years to get on LinkedIn, 3 years to Facebook, 1 year to Twitter, and so on.

Embrace randomness in the automation of the design process.

In 2011 Erik van BLokland quoted his brother Petr “everything that cannot be automated is design. anything that can be automated, will, eventually, be automated”. I made a screensaver with Henrik Birkvig that animated the atypi annual logotype that year.

House Industries presented Ed Interlock at ATypI Helsinki 2005.

2 years ago I redid my logo on my website www.wil.dk – from a “W” to a automated drawing that makes a slightly different logo each time.

These could be seen as musical notes, and even played! Demo!

Is there a strategy for publishing in this?

One challenge is the increasing amount of devices, formats and materials used for reading. Negroponte said ‘physical books will be gone in 5 years’ in 2010 because print works for a limited amount of poeple; and if you want worldwide information, it must be digital.

There are oboslete dinosaurs; all file based applicatoins, applications with dedicated formats, …

Wired + InDesign made an iPad Magazine, a 550mb thing. A huge thing! And lacks navigation, a snese of where you are.

We went tot he drawing board to make a magazine digitally.

New design principles with Petr van Blokland: Compliant to all standards. Separate content from design and techniques. The design knows the user (if you read slowly, it looks different). Unique information only exists once, and is replicated so updates are propagated.

xierpa.com is the CMS we built for such work: NomadEditions.com was one project we did with Xeirpa. TreeSaver is a JS library, initiated by Roger Black, and it is a client side rendering programe to render text and imges and fills the space available.

Landscape and portrait modes must be specific. There are not enough designers in the world to design everything! So we design rules for layouts and let the computer do it automatically.

The Nomad system was simplified for TypoBerlin2011 and also Ready Media templates. With @media css, the elements change depedning on the width of the display.

www.lukew.com did a mobile site. Mobile isnt major on the market yet, it will increase in importance. Why not make mobile first and then adapt desktop to what works for mobile?

Mobile first, desktop later (or not), and print later (or not), with all data in the cloud, and everything doubling every year.

Nadine Chahine: A typeface with a soul

Nadine is an Arabic specialist with Linotype, a Monotype Imaging company, but this is her own presentation and doesn’t have anything to do with her employer.

This typeface starts with the story of Lebanon. You know, the political situation? Lebanon had a civil war 1975-90, and when the war finished, people partied That’s the Lebanese response to good and bad news – people who were fighting became friends, and many people wanted to forget the tragedies of the past.

But some problems remained. The solutions didn’t really come, and while some people were gone – Israel had left, although the Syrians remained – in 2009 the ex prime minister was assassinated. Its a small country, 3 hours to drive across the whole country and 3-4 million people, a small country on the world stage. With the assassination, Lebanon was back in the western news, and there was more conflict.

A leading newspaper stepped from an observation role to a participatory role in events when the chief editor joined the Parliament. With the problems, the editor left for Paris, and when he came back he was assassinated. In his wake, his daughter who was 23 said she would take on the newspaper; she ran for his parliament seat too, and got it, and is now the youngest member of parliament.

For the 1st year anniversary of the assassination, she wanted to redesign the newspaper. It was last designed in the 1970s and she wanted to modernise, have digital versions, the whole thing. She got in touch with Mario Garcia, a leading newspaper designer. Nadine had read the paper as a kid, and while sometimes disagrees politically, she wanted to support her as a young woman and was very happy when she was asked to work on this project.

The team looked at the existing type, and Nadine made a new type design; working on the typeface design and the typography too, on type size, leading, which types to mix, those kind of specifications.

It happened FAST! It started with talks in November, focused meetings in early Deember, and the type was delivered by the end of the month! It was a full-on project, and it is a bold design, a masculine design especially for Nadine, being ‘tough and strong.’

Its more than simply a newspaper type, yet another normal 5 minute brief. The type is the voice of the paper. Its in a Naskh style for reading, it has compact proportions for headlines, and there are sharp angles. Looking at the Aleph, the first char drawn, the angles are not too sharp and aggressive… they are sculpted forms with shallow curves, like a puff of wind and you hold yourself against them. The calligraphic origins are there, but its solid – without being clumsy. That was Nadine’s inteiton.

There are 2 weights, as time and budget prevented more, and this works for headlines.

Here’s the old type compared with the new. Nadine likes to play, do hybrids, explore, but this is conservative within the reading conventions – more than her usual work – but there are details like sharp entry strokes. … The words look solid in themslves; the old design works fine, but it lacks the presence and there are thin details that don’t add up to the solid effect of the new one.

The headline type was briefed to work with the text face, so Nadine brought features from the text face into the new one; it was also designed to work well with Univers Next Arabic.

Here’s some mock spreads from the newspaper’s magazine. Nadine spec’d the various usage contexts; normally you loose control of how the type is used as a type designer, but with Nadine involved in the typographic specs she could set the type so it looks at its best – like a specimen for the work being printed every day! haha

Nadine was very excited to work on this project, and has a copy of the first issue literally HOT off the presses, so freshly printed that it has finger prints

And readers say that the newspaper is easier to read now!

Tom Milo: The rôle of Dutch Arabic Typography in Middle Eastern Printing

…

This from Venice, 1514, meant for Christians within the Islamic world, and there’s the first ‘europism’ – an “L” (mirrored) that doesnt existing in arabic writing. There are ‘z’ and /\ forms too throughout the centuries.

I have a concept of ‘script grammars’ where letters drawn wider can confuse. Arabic Ligatures are tehre to reproduce the structure, not just calligraphic flourishes. THis has been misunderstood for centuries.

…

How do you learn hebrew if you live in the low land marshes of the rhine?

…

Onur Yazicigil: The lack of Latin typographic heritage and type design in Turkey

The word lack might have a negative connotation, I mean ‘need’

Turkey once used Arabic, but ‘over night’ changed to Latin. This shift led to a lack of typograhic heritage.

Onur likes discourse about why type design didn’t become a concern in this region, and new attempts to do so.

The Turkish Republic spans 2 continents, the Ottoman empire controlled the land for 6 centuries. Turks were peasants in the Ottoman empire, and many groups were there. So there was a lot of writing systems. The Ottomans turkish language was written in arabic. Theres a great collection at the Ataturk … Archives in Istanbul.

Movable type didnt appear in the area until the 1720s. 300 years of delay!

In 1929 they adopted the Latin alphabet. Only 4% of the country was literate at the time. In 2 years, it was 48%. They were using the arabic script to write Turkish; there were many loan words, and these were replaced with french loan words, so there are now around 5,000 french words in turkish. Eg espas in turkish for letterspacing

Type terminology is pretty funky.

upper case and lower case became ‘big letter’ and ‘small letter’ but small caps is then ‘small big letter’

sans serif and serif became ‘nail’ and ‘no nail’

majuscule and miniscule fit better, so we can have ‘short majuscule’

Gorey was designing both latin and arabic. Emin Buran treated latin like kufi.

Onur showed his recent typeface project.

Proforma is one of his most respected serif types, but it had a small caps i dot problem. I submitted the fix and Petr really appreciate it

Finally, the IS Type event aims for future generations to explore and add to this heritage. www.istype.com – it finished 2 days ago and there’s another one next year – please contact Onur to attend! oyazicigil @ sabanciunix.edu

Thanks went to Type Together for helping with the IS TYpe goody bags, and Ross Mills of tiro typeworks, and david brezina for his poster.

Oh, one last thing, sometimes the remarks of ‘Turkish vs Icelandic’ about Latin-1 can be seen as antagonistic, and Onur thinks its important to stress that we are not enemies and to have a spirit of international collaboration. Awesome!

[Tom Milo has an awesome screensaver with 'atypi' in latin in the white space around arabic script writing icelandic things]

Usual disclaimer for live blogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the ATypI 2011, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke at ATypI on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect its because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately – or post a comment!

Also, Dave apologises for scribbling these notes in ascii, when many of the talks today are critiquing the reduction of subaltern characters to angloamerican technoimperialist ascii

Frank E Blokland: The Mythical Eye

Fournier said that the eye is key.

What is type design? Allen Hutt in his book on Fournier 1972 said being a type designer is ‘an indefinable quality’ which is silly

Lecturers, you know when start teaching that new students dont see what to see, and you teach them to see the way you see; conditioning.

Typography is formally representing hand written letters on the surface, but calligraphers can do a lot, avoiding collisions, as everything is custom. Typography, everything is a bound by a rectangle, its totally different. A calligrapher doesnt care about the space, he doesn’t have sidebearings. Where is the sidebearing of the C?

So its possible to have th elette

Could it be that these guys were even more clever? How were the rectangles decided? the x height is a key measure, adhtn the body. A system for small and large point sizes, and for

The ‘m’ has an ‘Em square’ that follows the golden relation. there’s also a golden relation between the x height and the jenson descender.

jenson worked in mainz for a perioid and made texturas. this is from gutenbergs 42 line bible, and the same system is used, with a ‘root 2 rectangle’

Font formats today are for all scripts, and these were very smart guys, who invented movable type, so i would guess they would have a sophisticated system.

Garamond’s Paragon Romaine (used by Slimbach for Adobe Garamond) and this relates the m to the ascenders and desceners of h, p, and cap height of H too!

Here’s an old display type with very long ascenders and descenders and huge caps. the paragon romaine is conditioned to be more familiar for text type.

Here’s a display type by van der keere, and the body size is related to the ‘E’ but it seems he made a mistake in the system

You can vary the propotions and see how the system proportionally adjusts everything else.

I looked for how the caps could be related to the lowercase, and the ‘m’ fencepost can be used to see the H and N are matched to the m outer stems, and this is too wide for us, and Griffo condensed these letters.

I looked at the original prints, not Slimbach’s revival, and original metal types, and you can see the height of the O and the width of the ‘m’ are equal.

In gutenburgs textura, i could see a spacing pattern that is very simple, the downstroke. iif jenson knew this system, would it apply to roman type? i think so. the h n u m d p q all fit the same width. this makes casting easy! on a 30″ screen, then ‘ni’ and ‘nl’ means you can adjust the ‘nl’, but the old guys were doing it very small, and in metal, they couldnt be so fine.

Jenson, and Griffo, these letters have the same rhythm which is no suprise. Van Krimpen’s Haarlema from 1938, using an existing unit arangement system. i think he drew the letters to fit an ‘m’ rhtym.

I divided the ‘m’ into 8 units, and each unit is the stem width. the sidebearings fit into that grid, and are almost the same as the adobe jenson!

If there is a ‘natural’ rhym to a type, can you blindly do the spacing? I did this with Adobe Jenson, and there’s a set of 4 images of cadence units.

if the letters are morphologically related, it seems this works!

I looked at Garamond’s de grow (?) romaine type original matrices, and the proportions for the display type is the same when scaled digitally from the paragone romaine.

You can see this 16th type and te b d g o n u o are all the same width, and this later type has many differnet widths.

these are granjon matrices, its the cursive of ITC Galliard but matthew carter. i tested this at plantin, casting their original matrices and the casting was so easy and simple! as soon as we had one wdith, we could cast many letters. we used an ‘o’ to set the overall width.

I think this system became forgotten by the later 17th century, and we found in the plantin museum ‘letter de la justification’ from te 18th c – but before that, you know if the ‘n’ sets the spacing on a system and he knoew the system, you didnt need such documentation.

I will post this informatin on typohile.

You know moxon’s mechanik exercises. this is thought of as the first time a grid was applied to type. this grid is similar to the one i found in jensons type. i think moxon did the same, he didn’t draw the grid though, just placed numbers. so i dont think the romaine du roi is the first gridded type; moxon was not an expert, he got his knowledge from all over.

Monotype Bembo is spaced this way too.

Swift, the ‘e’ in my system has too little space on the rigth, but its very close.

Documenta: my own spacing, my cadence spacing from stems, and the ‘kernus’ autospacing that looks at the white space around the letters

I think if you define the systems in a writing system, that is what type design __is__

‘Conditioning is based on conventions and subsequently …’

Q: Are there measuing tools from the 16th C?

A: No, there’s only the pacioli measuring of roman captials before the romaine du roi. my research seeks to get proof from the actual material, there is no written support. a historian asked me, what was the need for the punchcutters to make a system? I think its about quality, to control the typographic quality. its so simple, everyone knew it. its a tricky point of the research.

Icelandic

Here’s an email from a friend, “im abroad….” – Thorn becomes th, -D becomes D, AE becomes AE, U E lose their accents and O looses Umlout.

The IcelandAir inflight magazine does a similar thing, they got the accessnts but los the TH D and AE. This is their policy! They have a foreign audience, and perhaps its done this way to not frighten them

In the last few months, the ‘reduction algorithm’ in their database and search strings of Amazon and Biblio has got a lot better. so if you type ‘AE’ you will get hits for both ‘AE’ and ‘A E’ – and this is really good for Icelandic booksellers!

In 1988, license plates from one area stopped being started with a thorn, but you can still get these chars on your vanity plates. Will they be able to use number plate recognition across the EU with these chars?

Drupal doesn’t see thorn and -D as lowercase alphabet chars, and rejcets them. Its a Uncide support issue

Many icelandic people habitually reduce icelandic chars in file names. uncide support isnt robust across all contexts.

SMS is similarly usually reduced.

…

There are 2 visions of the future, one where ascii style reduction is dominant and repalcing -D with D and thorn with TH, and one where unicode is made more robustly supported and peple are educated to use their ethic writing more often.

…

Fred Smeijers: Life after Counterpunch

Research since 1996

We printed 6,000 copies in 1996, and I thouht we’d never get rid of them. 4 years ago we did, and needed to print another edition.

I wondered to expand the book with new research, or keep it as it is. Its slightly revised but essentially the same book.

Counterpunch 2 is coming, as a complement to the original. I don’t know why the book is alive and still interesting for type designers. Perhaps because it explains basics without extra fat. It has plain language, it can be read in one evening, and its a book with silly ideas I don’t take them back yet

What happened since? I conitnued, I looked at matrices too. There are big ones, odd ones with air channels, neat ones or strange ones. With matrices we can find punches that were lost.

If you look at matrices, you need to clean them and the photograph them. Is it in relief?

This is a counter. Huge. deper than is technically needed.

…

you can also use ‘digging’ rather than a counterpunch.

There are ‘shoulder’ punches that allow metal ‘composite’ chars

roman is easy, italic is more difficult, i think greek is tough. thank god i wasnt born in 1520. 24 matrices for the alpha’s accents. the alphas are the same? no, we can see their forms are different. they were willing to use shoulders one at a time but not two.

all accented matrices do not differ in width compared to teir parent within a margin of 0.15mm. this is important as it sets a clear reference.

Justin Howes thought I should take up casting. Type Spaces by Burnhill is an interesting book. He looked at manutius type, divided em square into 12 units. Justin said, If you have an em square of 4mm, and divided by 12, you can’t cast something so thin by hand!

I’ve been casting in 2006-2008, hundreds of times

I can go into a print shop in antwerp from 50 years later than manutius, and its a mess The Petite Nomparelie … from 15XX was the first 5-6pt type. we can look at the print, the type and the matrices.

…

The proportions of a lettes wdith, height and counter are defined by the width of the main stroke.

Michael Everson: A þorn by any other name

Thorn is from a rune. Its in the text of Beowulf, line 3,059.

Those of you old enough to remember and appreciate todays tech, the font on a typewriter was the only ane available. I would write a p, backspace and write a b, for a thorn, and draw in a -d with an x over it or by hand

You can could attachments for Smith-Corona typewriters.

Last year I asked, what makes Gealic type Gaelic?

Eventually I moved to a Mac Roman computer, and then ISO Latin-1 computers ,and there was a Mac Icelandic codepage, and then in 1991 Unicode made ASCII and Latin-1 as it first 2 things. Turkey put pressure on for Latin-5 to come before Latin-1, arguing that there were many turks and fewer icelandics. But Latin-1 prevailed as the first Uncide table.

European standard was drawn up for a sorting order for multilingual data, EN13710, and in iceland thorn is after Z, but in danish, it comes between T and U, and also for english.

The EU standardistas met in Iceland to decide. There were Danish and Icelandic actors in the conflict, and me My paper was presented in 1994, and thorn was sorted in the icelandic way.

Its now supported in OSs.

‘A Concise Dictionary of Middle English’ from 19th C used the danish sorting. I remade the dictionary fo the web and used moern conventions

On an iPhone, the Danish locale sorts it in the Danish way.

I filed a bug with Apple to replace he £ with € on the numeric keyboard layout. The IRISH keybaord on the iphone includes thorn as an option of T (but not the UK or US keyboards)

I added 4 more thorns, with strokes in the acedner or decender and cap or lowercase, from medieval writing.

Could there be more? A german linguist made a thorn with a back loop from the downstroke into the bowl, and anodhter style of thorn.

Historically the thorn was reduced to ‘y’ as in ‘ye’ like in Lewis Caroll’s poetn of ‘ye carpette knyghte’ – but there was never a ‘ye’! it was always ‘the’ but written with a thorn that got reduced

The Wycliffe bible from the 1300s got reduced, replacing the thorns with TH, and this occurs so frequently that thorns can save trees There’s 104 pages of ‘th’ in the bible, and its only 72 pages of thorns. a major saving!

www.þorn.info

Ralf Herrmann, Nadine Roßa: The German letter ß

@nadrosia and @opentype

Nadine: German has its special character too, ß

Type Designers often have their favourites, the ‘g’ or ‘a’ or “Q” and I like the ß (set) (or sharp S from unicode name)

Its in my surname, which makes a lot of trouble its often reduced to B.

Its rarely used, 0.31% combination (e is 17%) in german dictionary. reduces to ss. internationally its unknown, and within Germany it has an image problem.

it was used in parallel with ‘s’ for a long time, and used for ‘sz’ although the s was often a ‘long s’ that looks more like an ‘f’

there was a competition in 1879 to design the standard form, and the salszberg design won

there isn’t really a capital ß form. people find their own way to deal with this, like adding a descender to a ‘B’

there are lots of names for the char, ‘eszett’ is common, ‘sharp s’ or ‘rucksack s’ and even ‘german B’

Ralf: so for over 100 years, a capital ß has been proposed. its still controversial. Latin has a principle that the number of lowercase = uppercase, but in Germnany and Austria there are 26, umlouts with a o u, and then the ß that lacks a capital.

many people are habituated to this and dont think of it. there are some funny tweets about this from @letterror, @kioskfonts and @kupfers and @espeikermann said “how can a lowercase ligature become a capital letter?”

hte idea is that there are characters and ligatures. ‘fish’ and ‘FISH’, the ligature isnt used in caps as it makes no sense, so ‘Straße’ becomes STRASSE. thats a fine argument.

but this is only true if the ß is really a ligature like ‘fi’ and ‘fl’ – but its not used like a ligature.

German orthography isn’t like this. Here’s a Palatino specimen page showing it as its own char.

…

when blackletter was used commonly for writing German, there were may common ligatures, ff ch and sz (long s, z) but then when German was written in latin, the long s was lost, but the ß was kept.

Tje orthographi reform 1996-2006 made new rules for writing german.

there are now ligatures that became characters, like w, oe and ae; those are pronounced differently than ‘o e’ – so if you think ‘w’ is a true letter in the alphabet, so is ß

it doesnt matter about the history, its about what contemporary orthography assigns to the visual symbol

Eg, there are 3 wrods, Busen, Bussen, and Bußen (meaning bosom, buses and monetary) and they are pronouced differently.

But setting these words in all caps, they are BUSEN, BUSSEN and BUSSEN – so the context determines which word is being used.

The official replacement rules to conveft ß to SS aren’t round tripping. If I get a name in uppercase, I have no idea how to spell the name correctly.

A german dictionary in 1919 said ‘the use of two letters for one phoneme is just an interim solution and should be stopped as soon as an uppercase ß is made’

Many type designers have made such designs, 120+ fonts in MyFonts have it.

120 years ago, German lacked capital umlouts, and it was the same story; theres a google book n gram search that shows the ‘Ue’ replaced by the :U

@twardoch said that ‘were in a transition period, people will adopt ß more and more because ITS THE ONLY LOGICAL THING TO DO’

So I encourage you to put this in your fonts and let the German speaking people decide if it has a real use

Everson: to ID people in databases, you need to spell their name right or you will arrest the wrong people

Gudmundur Oddur Magnusson: Driftwood

What is Icelandic?

Ideas are not original, solutions are.

I teach at Icelandic Academy of the Arts.

…

Fiona Ross: Newspaper Non Latin Exhibition

This is Linotype donated material.

Relevance, significance and reliability.

This is a unique collection

The drawings of these text types, from the last 2 decades of 20th C, its 90% of the type in these cultures.

Reliability? Its biased toward LInotype, and it shows they kept informatin from problematic projects, the easy ones had less documentation, so it seems harder than it is.

its useful to have hydribs and interpretations. this is an experiment with phtographic negatives …

Alice SAvoye: I’m doing a PhD and I’m looking to document how design processes changed in the move from metal type to film setting. i spent time doing archive research, the collections in Reading of non latin type, you can see the effect of technology changes. you can hardly see this over time anywhere else. theres a diversity of material there. we can understand how designers worked day to day when the adapted type from hot metal to photo to digital.

Theres 2 bengali newspapers, one with metal with breaks between chars and the matrices couldnt always be aligned, and this made little jumps. whereas digital setting is smoothly aligned. this can be observed on the printed page, and the darwings and correspondance … what you can observe from teh printed page is reflected in the correposndence about hte desicn decisons. we dont show the correposdance here as its not as visually fun as the drwaings, but its important to credit the right people who did the work, and see the collaborative aspect of the work.

Fiona: There are drawings of devanagri chars by matthew carter and you see a revision. someone could misinterpret the meaning of the revision.

Sarah Owens: 12pt Times New Roman

Sarah asked me to remove the detailed notes about this presentation. You should contact her if you want to know the details; the following is a review with my own views of her presentation.

Sarah has been observing lay designers working practices and doing interviews about how they see themselves and what they are doing.

Popular computing can redistribute power, and I believe the commoditisation of design by word processors is as fine an example of this as the commoditisation of finance by spreadsheets. Sarah suggested that commoditisation of design has led experts to shift to generating templates for non-experts and assisting in their use, although her examples often featured people not using templates but manifesting their own visions.

Sarah noted how their design artifacts are often demonised or idolised, and felt this can be too simple. I agree with that! Sarah did interviews to understand how they are designed and why they look as they do in detail. She found people using apps they already had available (Paint, Word) and I was sad to hear how people were not curious about using more sophisticated tools. I hope that as libre licensed apps like Inkscape become more widespread, and video tutorials are YouTubed, this will change.

Sarah noted that active design choices are being made (type choice, layout, and an iterative process to overcome the imprecision of word processors’ page previews) and so her conclusion was that lay graphic design isn’t “The Other” of professional design and is worth examining to understand design as a fundamental activity.

Overall it was a clear presentation, and the photos used to illustrate the talk were great – my favorite was a A4 sign with very large all caps posted in a door window, saying ‘push button to open’, and placed above the generic, professional sign that was too small to command attention. I hope Sarah’s research will be publicly available some day

Usual disclaimer for liveblogging: These are informal notes taken by Dave Crossland at the ATypI 2011, and may or may not be similar to what was said by the people who spoke at ATypI on these topics. Probably if something here is incorrect its because Dave mistyped it or misunderstood, and if anyone wants corrections, they should email him immediately – or post a comment!

If you enjoy the details below, please join ATypI

Raph Levien (G): Spirals in the Cloud

Why make a new font editor? GWF wants lots of fonts

Spirals? Beziers get lumpy, especially when refining an existing curve; a bezier segment is optimised for mathematical computation, but isn’t what the eye sees, we see total contours. Interpolating splines are similar to real wooden ‘splines’ where you pin the wood with ‘whales’, these big heavy pins.

My spirals are based on Euler spirals, rather than elasticas, which is the maths behind real wooden splines.

This is the fundamental shape: [image of the S curve]. A beautiful curve, with beautiful maths. Its not a physically accurate simulation of an elastic strip, but its great for drawing, and it dates back to Euler’s time in the 18th C and many great mathematicians of the time knew about it.

Its more traditional than Beziers; Ikarus was unveiled at ATypI 36 years ago, and many people feel this is more accurate to their ideas than Beziers. Its been totally displaced in production, but some developers still consider it a good tool. It has a ‘biarc’ interpolating spline; you need a point for every 15 degree of curve. I took examples from the Ikarus paper and redrew with Spiro splines and found I needed half as many points to get the same degree of smoothness in a curve.

So here’s a demo. Its very unfinished; I hoped to get it more to release by now but that hasn’t happened, but development is ongoing.

You have regular polygon points, then the spiral points. You can see the whole curve moving to meet the points. Its not local editing; the maths in the curves guarantees smoothness. Its difficult to get G2 continuity with Bezier curves, but always happens here.

Something else I looked at was straight to curve transitions. This can be hard for new type designers to get to high quality; you get a visual bump if you are not careful about the straight to curve transition. Its similar to road design; if you have an off-ramp, you don’t want a jarring drive. The software I made to calculate these curves is used in the G Car project, and it stops the car having sudden changes in the steering wheel Human perception research backs up that smoother curvature is better

So here’s an attempt to draw a Thorn live

Here’s the regular spiral points, and now selecting some points we can set them to the ‘straight to curve’ points.

Another thing these splines are good for is bracketed serifs; using 2 consecutive straight to curve points.

One of the long term goals is to return to optical variations; this was tried before with METAFONT, Multiple Masters, TrueType GX… and these historical tools are powerful and there are great fonts made with variation.
But ordinary designers may not use that kind of technology.

This isn’t a finished part of the tool, but here’s an ‘a’ with an interpolatable number of points, and linear interpolation between the control points – and the spiral curves mean the outline stays smooth. Bezier interpolation has no guarantee of smoothness at all. The ‘s’ is more extreme, since the high curvature inside in very heavy type and low curvature in light type is a big difference, and yet this works very well.

So, ‘spirals in the cloud’, whats the cloud thing? Its big at google The idea of this being a WEB BASED font editor is that we can do collaboration. In GWF we email ZIP files of fonts around, that’s not ideal. It could be like Docs, with people sat around the world, working together to improve fonts, live. This will initially be useful for people to send in extra glyphs, and many people want GWF fonts to have more weights.

So here’s the Ubuntu font loaded into the editor, and its using Bezier splines. The goal is to take existing glyphs and new Spiral glyphs and merge them

Here’s the Nanum Myeongjo font. This is all running in Chrome, and even with a large font, its very responsive.

Its implemented in G Web Toolkit. GWT is used to make a lot of front ends at G, including the GWF directory today. We can write the tool in Java, it is compiled to Javascript and runs in the browser. JS is now very competitive with native apps, even multitouch is in HTML5 now, and there’s a LOT of engineering to make the HTML5 canvas (the underlying drawing engine) really good, and today it often uses accelerated graphics cards.

The back end is java G App Engine. Many G products use this, and if you get a million users, its no problem.

And this is not just a HTML5 app; the vision is of loosely coupled blocks. Existing editors can read and write the cloud fonts, it can hook into auto-hinting tools… but the tool doesn’t tackle hinting problems.

ttfautohint is interesting as it will make autohinting useful if funded. Hinting is less important in the future, as screen hardware resolution goes up, and Mac and DirectWrite become more widespread, but it is needed today.

Q: File formats? Transform Spirals to Beziers?

A: Yeah, there’s some simple scripts that are highly optimized, I don’t have tools to convert Beziers to Spiros but it is possible with high accuracy.

Q: Can you edit typical font metadata?

A: I haven’t developed that part. I plan to open source it soon, I hoped to do that for today, but it will be soon, and its an important part of the font creation process, so if people want to add that, that is great!

Q: Whats the roadmap?

A: I want to get it out there in a usable form, so you can create a font, a total cycle. Its an open road map, driven by user interest and what people end up using it for. If you’re interested, talk to me after

Dawn Shaikh (G) and Steve Matteson (Monotype): Typefaces for Mobile OS

Steve: G needed something for mobiles, that worked with the freetype rasteriser. The same vectors can look different depending on the rasteriser used, you know how Photoshop has 5 settings for rendering type, and this is similar to switching platforms and browsers.

Custom type designed for specific uses is a long time tradition. Goudy said, ‘if one type is more suitable than another, there must be some type MOST suitable’. When I start a new type, I want to consider the voice; different mobile vendors sharing a platform will have different voices.

We couldn’t be too cute or too techno. My initial sketches added little bounces to the shapes. We started with too much personality. We also tried something totally different, more techno. I went back to earlier drawings and Droid Sans grew out of this.

Studies with the UX team, to decide how many weights to have. On a phone you want a hierarchy of information. We made many weights but a small filesize footprint on devices meant that we had to cut it down to just 2 weights, and auto obliques rather than true italics.

We made a lot of mock ups, and the designers did a lot with coloring of text to get the effect of a range of weights.

We also needed a monospace for programmers. Times New Roman is small and spindly on screens, Century has thicker strokes but closed forms that aren’t great on screen, but it is thicker. Georgia is the gold standard in serif screen type.

I did sketches of the medium forms, and we then added a true italic, so it became a 4 style family. WGL-4 was the initial character set, and then it was extended to Cyrillic and Vietnamese, from 600 to 800 characters. There is a Droid CJK with 40,000 characters. One of Wired’s editors wrote ‘the fonts look Gy’ so that’s good

Droid Sans is intended to reach across languages. Here’s some common fonts. This Arabic appears very small, the Hebrew too heavy. For branding, it is so crucial to hold the brand together to have the typefaces all speak with one voice.

Pascal Zoghbi couldn’t make it to ATypI personally, but he did the Arabic. This is the Kufi style, and then the Naskh style. He experimented with white space on the baseline, and decided that a solid base was best for mobiles. This is the final Kufi style that is shipping in phones. The UX team in the Middle East explained that we couldn’t only have Kufi as its not preferred for reading, so we made a Naskh style; here’s a diagram from Pascal about how pen size relates to the letter forms.

We wanted a large ‘X height’-like sizing in the forms, so that users don’t have to zoom as soon as they land on a web page. Here’s a diagram of the features that marry the Latin and Arabic letter forms.

Dawn: I work with Chrome OS as a user experience researcher, focused on fonts and on-screen reading. I wasn’t involved in this project until it was brought to the international stage. It became a full time project for me, to determine when the fonts were ‘good enough’ to ship. I said ‘its good enough when 100% of the most vocal stakeholders agree it is good enough’ – sometimes there’s a huge group, sometimes its just 3 people.

I had to work really fast! For researchers its not the way we like to work, but Arabic was done first, but the project was soon to launch, and we had no tools built (as Kevin Larson’s group has used) so it was all qualitative testing. I know only a little Arabic, Spanish and Hindi so it was challenging: users were on 4 continents, across timezones…

All the methods were ‘stakeholder reviews’. We did 1:1 interviews with native speakers, who were mostly Grs who spoke the language and loved typography and wanted to make the fonts better. Sometimes I got external participants, even flying to NYC as there is much cultural diversity there. We would get the fonts onto phones to test with.

When we worked with Thai users, the 1:1 interviews told us that the font was perfect, but no one liked it. In a focus group, once one person started critiquing, we were there for 3 hours. So culturally, what works varies.

And finally, we did 100% email reviews by the most committed stakeholders. I assembled key questions from my previous work, and took a group of 40 stakeholders. Some wrote 5 page documents! 36 did 4 reviews across the whole process which was great! If the group is committed, the email reviews are fast and effective.

Over the last year this Review process is one I feel works for any kind of font: Monotype sends several font samples, with fonts that really work and are good, with a few that are less good, and I get feedback from stakeholders and send that to Steve’s team at Monotype. They design the fonts, and I get more feedback. That process is repeated throughout the creation of the fonts. As it becomes a final design, we try for 100% stakeholder sign off.

Lessons? Being involved early is best. Committed stakeholders are key. If I go to external stakeholders, it takes a lot longer and costs real cash, so I try to keep stakeholders happy and engaged. It is an iterative process, and lots of communication from the rough idea is key.

Eben Q: To what extend is the feedback in this process available to other type designers?

Dawn A: We work so fast, I didn’t consider making it public. It surely would be valuable, and we learned a lot across many languages. I’ll see

Q: Steve, how did you use this feedback?

Steve A: I took it with a grain of salt at first, eg with one script, a comment was like ‘Its good, but it looks like a short fat man.’ Well, what to do with that? Is ‘it’ the font? ‘it’ a specific glyph? Ambiguous feedback was tricky. And some feedback you can see is subjective; as a type designer you have an intuition about whats useful, and some other comments were very true and good feedback. It depends on my familiarity with the script, and how specific the feedback is. Like a lot of things, as we work in other regions of the world, its harder to find experts. These scripts haven’t been designed for mobiles before, so how to bring the script to Chrome and the new age is often an open question.

Frank Steitiya (URW): Fonts for a Globalizing World

[missed most of this]

URW’s non latin fonts are almost all made by native readers, and our own tools make it possible to them to do so. Nimbus Sans Global

Frank Blokland (DTL): Parametrized Type Design

This has overlap with my talk tomorrow. Today I want to talk about parameterised type design.

A large part of the design can be automated and WILL be automated. we need resources and a good defitinition of what happens. a grapheme is a graphic represenation of spoken language. movable type in te 15thC, letter shapes written in italic were fied and the invetion a few centries early, we would today use gothic type, texturas

What are we dealing witH? when writing, making graphemes, you must udnerstand the system. this is my diagram, starting with a script, then the writing system, then graphemes, there are grpaheme subseystms like capital, lowercase, cursive, and then each has a harmonic/propertional/relational/rhytmic system subparts.

first, harmonic system complrises of 1 harmonic models. yo know v and w and k and x y and z and s are from a different system, from captials, and combied with other letters that are not related. it looks harmonised but its not. that you need kerning pairs shows they are not prfectly combined.

second, a proportional system. in a rotunda system you see this clearly. there is a reltion betweeen horizontal and vertical shapes.

third, relational system, contrast of pen, and this effects stroke width. x height and pen width are also related. same contrast but lower x height makes the type heavier in weight.

4th, the rhytmic system, the relation of stroke thickness and interletter spacing. i think garamond and jenson already had a letter spacing system.

5, formalisation. taking the pen strokes and making them into formal type convetnions, and, 6

6, the idiom. you can make basic stuff on the computer and you make specific and unique things on that design. like rembrand did in the past, they had others make the base canvas and they made the FINAL stuff and signed it.

type design is that simple!

how much can the computer do for you? oyou go out, take a beer, come home, finish it, and sign it off

programming is expensive though, so its 10-20 years away, but i tihnk we can do this

My LetterModel is similar to sketches by Edawrad Johnson on a blackboard in 1930.

A skeleton shape, applying a broadnib to it? Totally wrong. here’s this with 15′ and 30′ nibs. 15′ isn’t “right”, the arch doesnt connect to the stem. Its that the broadnib itself defines the skeleton shape! those 2 degrees create different skeleonts.

Capitals can be done this way… you can have a model on which you apply the pen effect and it works okay for caps. the skeleon form, the latin model is BASED on the broadnib.

the first roman type was based on written letterforms, and you can see the move from writing to roman type. this is a geomtrics miniscule. you can say yuo dont like it, but its readable, and 100% what you get from a broadnib.

the first step in formalisation is to replace the feet with triangular serifs. you cant find this in renaissance times. then ‘split button serifs’ are added at the top. next, you see the jenson from 1470, and here’s a book from that period, the wide, round letters have more space. the ‘e’ bar has become horizontal, some letters are a little more compressed. this is first seen in griffo/manutious’ hypnomachia (?) and these are the proportions that most people consider standard.

We can use the LetterModel to place over the Paragon Romaine by Van de Keere, based on Garamond, and see how these shapes relate to the model. If you are using the same elements, you can let teh computer do this work If you change the ‘a’ then you know the change should be upated in the ‘e’

I showed this to a famous dutch type design. he said he never worked in that way. but this can lead to new type

I also found relations between letters; the ‘m’ width and cap height. the golden section rectangle. ‘n’ square.

Also i found grids in Jensons work.

…

I found spacing is quite simple, since you can find the rhym based on space ‘a’ from center of letter ‘n’ to x bbox, and look for that unit in the letter, and its from left side of left stem of ‘n’ to left side of right stem. If you have a big screen, sure, but these guys worked at 40pt and they didn’t see the details as we do, they saw overall rhythm. so you can space type without looking; this is the fencepost rythm, no optical correction, and then a little bit, like ‘ib’ should have a kern. 3rd one, i refined a little more, and this is not optical. finally there is the slimback adobe jenson. This usggests to me that the casters in the 16/17thC used a system of standardised widths.

Cpatials are totally different. Spacing is based on the ‘H”. This is DTL Haarlem. HHHOHHH.

But you have to combine them with the lowercase. can do them on the ‘mmmmm’ grid (where stems are aligned)

So I wondered if you can make a spacing system of this? roman type is related to Jenson’s type in some way, so can you measure your tyepface and used a fixed system to space it? This is SO simple, my 84 year old mother can understand it This is the sapcing I did in 10 minutes. We will make a LetterFitter program to do this in a second A lot of what we consider ‘optical’ can be explained in this way.

Finally, idiom. this is the HARD part. you can get the computer to do a lot of things, but this is the hard part. perhaps you can even encode a designer’s idiom, ‘unger type’ or ‘X type’. if you cant describe it, it doesnt exist if you are a lecturer, and you dont describe what is happening, its not good teaching.

so we have some tools to implement this system, and eventually we will get a complete design system. and thats it

Adam Twardoch (Polish Mafia): OpenType Mastering

[5 mins late]

Mac Terminal defaults dont match the icon

Theres few tools; FontLab, Fontogrpaher, and terminal tools like TTX.

We can get rid of the terminal, and replace it with the DTL OTMaster developed by DTL and URW++. A useful, I found, companion to font production workflws. FontLab studio, Fontographer, UFO tools, others. DTL tool is useful. Windows and Mac versions are available. Its a GUI tool. We have 2 fonts open here, a tree of the OT tables, and we can take a look. we can see the glyphs, dive into the tables like glyph table and see what glyphs are built of. A good place to start is to work side by side with a browser pointing to the OT spec on microsoft.com/typography and the glyf table, you have various flags and for them the detailed explanation of what is in sight can be seen on the OT spec. when i tried to read the OT spec, i couldnt make sense of it. but this is a way to VISUALISE it. you can read the spec, see what is in a font, and it starts to make more sense. so you can learn omre about opentype and how it works inside. i recommend familiarising yourself with the OT spec with the OTMaster tool on a high quality font. The NAME table is useufl.

OT layout tables, you can see what is inside. Kerning can exist in 2 ways, GPOS as a kern feature, or as a TrueType ‘kern’ table that is ‘old style’. these can coexist as different apps may not use the GPOS kerning. if it has both, the old kern table will work as a fallback (but its limited in size)

Mark attachemnt previews, and glyph viewer so you can see the glyphs, and also previewing rendering with gridfitting (truetype hinting) and greyscaling with FreeType.

OTF consistency checker, also checks TTF, and this is a great lint tool. I found a problem in a font I made 2 days ago with this.

The simple workflow is to turn a VFN into an OTF with FontLab. You might have a UFO imported to FLS and into OTF. What if you make chagnes? Easy way is to change the original UFO and do these compilation steps. But these steps from UFO to VFB to OTF are probably not automatic. You may tweak some aspects, use other tools like OTF to VOLT to OTF again. Maybe you forget the UFO and make chages directly to the hinted VFB?

A useful solution is to make small changes that do not effect the design directly to the previously generated OTF. You might even take that OTF back into a VFB or even UFO. Since you can at any step in the workflow, you can even look the workflow. VFB -> OTF -> VFB -> OTF … And this can save a lot of time.

Fontographer is a design oriented tool, opposite to OTMaster, which has no design tools but allows detailed modifications. FLS is in the middle, with features similar to OTMaster and also it offers design tools.

Examples?

XITSMath.otf in OTMaster. A math font with a large number of glyphs, similar to the new MS Office Math engine, the OpenType MATH table, a MS extension to OT.

There is a kind of glyph editor, with layers, remove overlaps, etc. I can import a new glyph as an EPS.

XITS is a libre (OFL) font so we can make such changes.

I recently mastered the Lato fonts, as we’re preparing a Pro release. When I opened my final TTF, I checked it in the ‘Consistency Checker’ and i saw that the extended latin glyps that were made for the font but then removed for the OFL version, still had the ‘latin range’ flags set even though the glyphs were now missing. Similarly, the OT GPOS and GSUB features, I could export the FEA file from OTMaster, then import it into the OFL Lato, and I can see that it has filtered the Pro FEA file to just the features that are supported by the glyphs in the font. So I can have a monster FEA file to cover everything, and make a Latin and Latin-Extended font and OTMaster has this intelligence to filter the OT features to the characters extant in the font.

Pablo Q: Why did you have class kerning?

Adam: That wil work as well. the syntax is, well, it looks different, but that is class kerning.

Q: can you type FEA code in OTMaster?

Adam: You use a text editor and import, mostly. DTL OTmaster is available from fontlab.com with Fontographer and Fontographer.

Q: How to maintain a sane source file?

Adam: What I do, PS VFB, TT VFB, then XY hinting, then autohint, then best versions

Dave Q: you mentioned ttfautohint, could you explain that?

Adam: its freetype, it works well for bolder faces, for lighter faces we use fontlab autohinting, and if your stems are thin, you should be more careful. if the stems are thick, and there TTFAutohint is nice. Werner is accepting donations, and I think its a good idea. FontLab Autohinter is good but not always the best choice. ttfautohint can be better, in some cases its worse. check the output These 3 tools, FLS, OTMaster and ttfautohint are all good tools.

Dawn Shaikh, Marc Tobias Kunisch (G): The subtle & peculiar lessons we learned from G Web Fonts users

[10 mins late]

Dawn: Users wanted ‘try before you buy’ and they wanted to easily compare fonts side by side. they would come up with lots of workarounds. they wanted suggestions about what good fonts are. if the suggestion is too subltle they miss it and if to blatant they resent it. they want a beautiful website to showcase the fonts. they knew examples. they wanted good organization. fast and intuitive filtering, not too complciated and not too simple. Users wanted powerful search, and excellent rendering on all platforms, browsers. They wanted an easy way to download the fonts. An easy way to call multiple web fonts at one time.

There were things users didnt care about; detailsed stats on font usge was liked by type designers but users didnt care. popularity and newly added were good for users. designer inforamtion wasnt so good, only real type geeks but most users ignored it or found it distracting. our sample was US centric, and they didnt care about extended latin. font licenses, users didnt look too closely unless they were an org concerned about lawsuits.

G, these are libre fonts, and users were concerned about poor quality, missing characters, not sure if it was curated.

Users didnt like tagging much, and didnt understand who puts the tags there. Is it old fashioned to me or my grandma? One user said it was noisy.

Most people tried G Web Fonts as its free, and they stck around because the fonts are good an deasy to implement. many users had trial accounts they could rattle off, and they would bounce around web font services. users were not sure how to determine the value of web fonts. its unclear what their ROI is and how they can measure it. they didnt know how to pass the expense on to clients. they had concerns about recurring expenses. if they pay $100 this year, will it be $150 next year? If they give a company their CC details, they dont want to be auotmatically billed.

Users are more willing to pay for fonts they can downolad. Its valuable to use it on the web and in any other ways.

There were mixed views about the pay/font vs pay/subscription models. 50/50, some users felt TypeKit style model was best, mostly designers, where they want to change their mind of use a few fonts, and that pay per font was limiting. but then develoeprs thought they would pick the font, not change it, and paying a one off fee was fine. designers wanted to give their clients options. so tahts the initial research we did, not Toby will talk about turning this into action.

Toby: I was in charge of the relaunch. First, we did a workshop with everyone, engineers, type people, UX people, and a facilitator, and spent a half day wriing ideas on postits and posting them on a wall, then half a day arranging them, then into a spradhseet and raing them in terms of impact and feasability. we made a large diagram with X for impact and Y for feasabilty. so the top right are things with impact that are possible to do:

Font colelction, future proof UI, custom text preview, font selection mechanimc, advanced font specimn, organize by headline and body copy, and font combinations. those were the targets. then we did a ‘design sprint’ although it was more of a concept sprint. lots of paper prototyping and whiteboards, this was for a week, and the last few days we were met with the product manager and engineers, so we could discuss what to do.

this is the general idea from that week, ‘choose review use’ and then the current version of the site. while creating the site we used ‘RITE’ method, a game design team at Microsoft came up with it (its on wikipedia) and it was very rewarding to see the changes working better and better as you go

We also did task based tesing, asking users to find what font was used in a graphic (lato:100) and it could be tough when we came up with a clever idea and then users didnt see it or guess how it worked.

For suggested usage, we found that people who knew about type got cross with suggestions that a font was only for text use, and so we just made teh fonts display in 2 modes, headline and text, and have teh default the recommended use.

The filters, people think of a ‘font’ as what is actually a ‘font fmaily’. so selecting styles within families was tricky. we had users add families and then at the final step ask which styles they actually want from teh families.

We launched, and you can see the satisfaction survey bar charts now.

Q: users dont care about tags?

Dawn: they want to SEE the fonts. if you ask them to saearch for a wedding font, they will on any site, filter a little, and then scroll the fonts. the tags, any sites that had them, i had to ask users what tags are, users always skipped over them.

Frederik Berlaen (Dutch Mafia): The missing UFO editor

I live and work in Gent as a father, designer, teacher and programmer. I’m here to talk about the missing UFO editor, RoboFont.

To introduce myself, I did Kallicultator, a final project for T&M in Den Haag, it generates contrast around a skeleton, its not finished, and FontConstructor is type design from another direction, elements that can be pieced together. A playful tool to explain how glyphs are mades from similar parts. Its a gratis program.

RoundedUFO is a tool initiated by Erik van Blokland, and UFOs have round corners.

UFOStretch is a tool for making eg smallcaps

RoboFont will be released later today, I hope: its a nice story.

Erik said, Robothon 2009, “The tools you choose, influence your creative process”

This encourages me to make better tools and make better skills in programming to make better tools.

What is it? RoboFont is a UFO editor. UFO is defined at unifiedfontobject.org, its a folder with XML files, you have the font as text you can edit in many apps. There is prepolator, superpolator, metrics machine, area 51, a few tools from me. apps that do one thing, bound together by the UFO format.

One thing missing! AFter Robothon 2009, there was no app to generate a UFO from scratch. These apps all use UFO as their native format. They do one task only. They only correct contours, do OT features, or generate a binary file. They do one thing, but very well.

Petr van Blokland messaged me on iChat, thats how it started.

RoboFont is to manage your design process, draw black and white shapes, edit UFO data, and scrpiting is key. its important to my design process. its really a platform, a second desktop for your type work. I think your desk is good, your phsyical desk is different if you are doing a headline type or a revival and so should your editor from project to project.

What will it not do? No knowledge; i don’t like when an app designs for me. It doesn’t know naything about anything, I think designers should make the decisons, and the power to design their fonts. It contains no hinting, so far, many users ask about this but its a spcialist thing and I think its ok to leave that to experts. you can do scripting, there are deep hooks to the data object, so you can embed a hinting tool it does have basic kerning too. Kerning is a mastering job to me, not drawing; you may do some metrics but not the whole thing.

Demo!

Its Lion! Start a new project, you have a charset template (no ‘encodings’ files, so 90s…) and you have a Features text editor, a font info metadata similar to Area 51, a space cetner for metrics, and a kerning tool that wiill launch metrics machine if you have it, or a very basic metrics UI if you dont. Since there’s no encoding, you can sort the font table’s sorting and so on. There’s also a simple toolbar icon to launch in any UFO tools.

There’s a boolean finder view, it accepts regular expressions, and you can save these ‘sets’. there’s a table view of the metrics and glyph data.

Then there’s the GLYPH view; you can select points, multiple handles at the same time, undo obviously, there’s a pen bezier tool, you can measure very easily (and this is important for my design process) and these rulers stay on the canvas.

Remove Overlap is tough, the Adobe FDK tool is a mess, and i worked wth Tal to make a new Remove Overlap. Thanks Tal!

We have layers, its UFOv2.

You can drag and drop in a raster image, and apply basic scaling/rotating, and contrast/etc transforms to make tracing it easier.

Space CEnter has a main text input, and then left and right text input that insert that into the main text. zoomable, drag the metrics. can double click to edit the glyph. multiline, waterfall, ‘x height cut’ that hides all ascenders and descadners, there’s a ‘beam’ style metrics you can drag and drop up and down the glyphs.

There’s a single window mode, and the preview/layer/transform tools are nicely done.

We have curve error detection that is set in preferences, so if you point is ‘off by one’ it will highlight the spline in turquoise. we can show live bitmap previews. we have guides, that can rotate, guides can show intersection measurments, you can set how magnetric each guide is. You can label points, and these labels are shown on canvas.

A lot of things came from RoboFog, the uber type design application.

You have a simple python REPL, and then there are python extensions. python scripts to run in the tool, and then ‘extensin builder’ like Sfari has, to build plugins so RoboFont can be extended.

These extensions are files and when you run them in the Finder, they instantly appear in the app. Eg a shape tool. Here’s a RoundingUFO extension that adds that functional to this app.

Erik made an arabic extension to do arabic kerning. This took a day to make!

So, that quote, really sums it up, “The tools you choose, influence your creative process”

www.Robofont.com

Claus Q: How much does it cost?

A: €400. A fair price. Every time you use it, you are saving money! Its due out tonight.

Q: Encoding?

A: you just write the glyph names, and you set their unicode value.

Q: can it autodetect the unicode value from the name?

A: no, thats knowledge. you can name it any way you want. I dont like the adobe short names, they dont make sense to me, and i cant remember numbers.

Q: Can you implement kalliculator as a plugin?

A: Sure, there’s nothing hidden or magic, you can see everything and write any plugins.

Ted Harrison (FontLab): Protect your fonts with EPAR

EPAR is about education of the user. Background and definitoins.

EEULA, started 6-7 years ago, embedding font license ifnormation inside the font to make it accessible to users, so they know there is al icense and they can easily figure out what they are allowed and are not allwed to do, and act approprietate. we hope that invvled UPGRADING their font license.

EPAR is the implementation of this idea as a SFNT table. It took a while to figure out what the fields should be, and we managed to try it out. the first thing with Paratype was an online version, to add EPAR to an OpenType font.

We then got this into Fontographer 5.1, released a few months ago. Demo!

Go Element, Font Info, click Advanced, and then Licensing, and you see all the EPAR fields. Each field can be ‘N/A’ or “Limited” or “unlimited”.

[DC: There's lots of nasty restrictions on time, number of uses, format conversions, places it can be used, embedding, modifications, sharing, license transfer, compression, bundling - and telling users URLs for the license, an upgrade url, and there's a password to hopelessly try and restrict people from changing these DRM flags. This is a pretty comprehensive list of ways fonts can restrict people, and this would be a pretty beastly DRM system if anyone ever implemented it...]

When I open a font with an EPAR in Fog5.1, it opens a popup modal display that disappears on click that explains the EPAR restrictions in english. there’s also “a nag screen” that is displayed when users open a glyph editing window and modifications are not allowed.

Next steps?

EPAR table import/expoert so you can populate an EPAR with your standard license once. a ‘portable feature’ for your whole catalog

Font Agent Pro, used by big corporate cusotmers who want to track their font licenses, and when EPAR is integreated, it means they can easily see what they are allowed to do. Eg in a corporate merger, they can easily see how many licenses they need for all their new employees.

We will make a DLL so all font aware applications will be font license aware. we’re making a Read-EPAR DLL, as part of the Font Agent project, and anyone can license that like Adobe licenses the FDK.

Finally, the original EEULAA idea of ‘font personalisation’ where private information about the licensee is inserted into fonts. THis is scheduled for the next version of EPAR.

We have a EULA SIG, tomorrow at 2pm.

Q: when users upgrade, how do they all get the EPAR upgarde in their files?

A: the EPAR table is portable. the last field, the EULA part has a ‘remote’ URL where you keep their EPAR table. so you can sit the importable EPAR table at a URL, and every time they use the font, their system will check the URL and if that URL is updated, their files will be updated. you just change your EPAR file.

Q: Would you be better talking to font and OS vendors? what if the user doesnt use font manager software?

Ted: we hope to, but its one step at a time.

Adam: if a few font managers adopt it, then a few OS people might adopt it.

Atilla Korap (Monotype): You said you want a revolution…

Jobs said there is a beatles song for any moment

Revolution is a big word, the French revolution, a political revolution about their society. Then there are revolutions of the mind, paradigm shifts, and technical revolutions. those seem more interesting to me – the industrial revolution with steam engines and machine factories. typesetting was part of that.

the latest revolution is the digital revolution. we have digitized typefaces for a long time, and now we are able to provide web fonts for all browsers.

this has a long history, and i looked from the start, HTML1, who were involved and what tools. CSS1 gave you control over typography, but only supported system fonts.

CSS2 introduced this, it was removed in 2.1 and put back in CSS3.

Neither TrueDoc (PFR) or EOT took off by 2001, and everyone was worse off. “You can’t always get what you want” is the stones

Web fonts was a lost cause, no one asked for them or were offered.

Then out of nowhere in 2007, WebKit announced that it would support @font-face with regular TrueType fonts. No conversion, encryption or compression. The positive reactions from users and web designers, it became a ‘thing’ and after that a lot happened fast.

The type “industry” reacted to this, and there’s a big discussion in the W3C forums, and someone suggested reviving EOT. Browser developers and W3C wanted an open standard, EOT was proprietary, and so some people suggested URL binding is DRM. So Ascender suggest ‘eot lite’ without all that, but this also wasn’t appreciated. the discussion was tough and went up and down, ideas of ‘partial fonts’ that browsers could assemble, or obfuscate OpenType fonts so that they can’t be installed, a compressed font format ZOT, and finally, Erik and Tal made WOFF with Jonathan Kew. A solution to all the questions.

Daniel Rhatigan, Monotype: Web fonts

Summary: Type designers are working hard to make web typography look good, but its really up to web publishers to ensure what people see is good.

Web fonts is a shifting landscape. customers expect vendors to take care of eerything. i made a document for customers to understand using type on the web. or on screen.

not all browsers support all formats, not all vendors support all formars….

rendering is a key issue. people fall into a full continuum from old school typographers to print people to newbies. often people think of fonts as clean outlines. but there’s a software rendering environemtn and then hardware too that translate those typeforms.

“Its rough out there”, and we have a responsibilty to you to make good type, and you have a resposiblity to your audience to make it great for people.

Type looks different on macs and windows. I show a side by side screenshot of the web font awards mac sfarai and windows 7 firefox, and then on MacOS safarai, iPad safari, and iphone 4 sfari, you can see there is a lot of difference.

Type choice is a key thing for web fonts. Most fonts were designed for other purposes! all software issues aside, there are classic book faces not intended for this coarse environment. Since the DTP revolution its been easy to choose many fonts but its not always true they are great choices.

First thing people have to grapple with on the web, after a basic set of core fonts with similar proportions, is vertial proportions. The internal proportions mean the same point size between helvetica, goudy old style (small) and caecila (big) varies optically.

This also effects the interline spacing; this is all set the same size and set solid, and frutiger, gill sans, garamond and neue helvetica are all very different amounts of text and feels.

you see that designers and developers are at odds about this issue; because they were not anticipating the current environment.

Eg this New Yorker page using ‘MAD MEN’ and the A bar is aliased badly. but its okay in this page layout.

frutiger vs helvetica, frutiger has open apertures and loose spacing. a lot of work has gone into making both work well on screen, but the basic design of frutiger means it works better on screen. most people dont look at this level of detail but it matters.

Choose families wisely. you must look at the linked styles within the family, the italic and bold may be too narrow or too dark on screen. this means specifying work is harder, to ensure the reader has the best experience getting through it. Our big multiweight families are selling well because you can choose which weight you want to get the right pixel density.

Moving beyond type choice, the designers and developers setting the text is the next thing.

Setting type in relative units is okay with verdana and georgia, but mixing helvetica with gill sans or bembo that have a small x height, you have to bump up the x height so they look similar, but in proportional units this will throw off the line height. so you want to specifiy px units to get a predictable outcome.

If in doubt, be more generous with space and size means things are a little easier to read.

Everyone is racing to make web fonts look good, hinting existing fonts to look better, revising outlines and spacing to look clearer at small sizes, designing new fonts for screen display.

Speak up and tell us what you want!

I’ve made some test pages at www.rhatigan.org/mt/ and you can email me at dan (a) monotype.co.uk about them

Christopher Slye: CFF on the web

OTF is diffferent to TTF, I’m not going to smack on TTF, but OTF does have benefits for web typography. TTF is huge, OTF is much smaller, and WOFF-TTF is smaller than that, but WOFF-OTF is even smaller!

Simple idea:

TT: dumb rasteriser, smart fonts.

OT: smart rasteriser, dumb fonts.

TT fonts have INSTRUCTIONS. OT have HINTS. “Hinting” vs hinting. Accurate, its instructions, and this is important distinction.

Type2 charstring format docs say ‘hint are just hint, recommendations, for an intelligent rasteriser’

http://www.rastertragedy.com/

Can TT instructions behave more like hints to accomodate a wider variety of screens?

Well, thats what CAREFULLY HINTED CFF fonts look like in modern browsers. basic TT conversions look good too.

…

Adobe Garamond is a classic from 1986, and this has very even stems. This is MSIE6 with CFF converted to TT and then EOT.

…

Does the evolution of screen technology to justify a large investment in TT developemnt? I hear a lot of anxiety about TT hinting.

Does the hinting of most TrueType web fonts really look that good? If you look at the most popular fonts on FontSquirrel, they are not hinted well. They might be better with CFF.

Some personal theories I want to throw out; TT procedure hitns means its more vulnerable to hacks and exploits; its a programming langauge. Some peopel worry about it, although I don’t know of examples. CFF Native efficency is less work for the client than simple compression.

Conclusion, consider both CFF and TT and choose the one that works best for that situation, and support the improvement of CFF renderers.

Chris Lilly Q: Where are we with those CFF rasterizers improving? is it just starting, or winding down?

A: People should care about it more, and there are all these devices. a lot of embedded hardware can do a lot better with CFF.

Tom P: Apple dont care about TT hints, Mac OS and iOS renders them the same! And DirectWrite is now nice with CFF, and thats the future for Microsoft platofrms.

Q: what about old IE versions?

A: CFF in EOT will work in MSIE8 i heard! Im not sure about MSIE7. FreeType CFF rendering isnt so great, and its something adobe would like to see improved.

Vlad Q: to build a good rasteriser, is it publicly specd?

A: I think its there publicly and adobe would help.

Victor Gaultney: ScriptSource

If you are a type designer asked to extend your type to an unfamiliar script?

Many places are out there, but some conflict and may not be correct.

Where first?

G.com

A huge amount of 42 million results. what are some familiar ones?

Omniglot, a static site, quite limited.

Wikipedia, a big one, with lots of oddly linked pages. it seems comprehensive, but may be inconsistent. today there’s 3 pages listing what languages use Cyrillics, and they dont agree at the moment

say you want to know what glyphs to support for the languages your users are using? unicode site doesnt tell you what languages need which characters, and you might not be able to afford them all.

unicode gives you static data, useful but limited, and not a guide to design.

decodeunicode is a great site on specific glyphs, and contains a LOT of stuff. but its focused on characters.

theres the diacritics project website.

typophile, a great community forum with many wise designers and technical experts, sharing a lot of expertise, but while there are some wiki pages, most of the know how is locked up in old forum threads.

what you want is something that pulls the best bits of all these sites.

I work for SIL International is a not for profit, faith based charity, serving langauge communities around the world, doing literacy, linguistic research, transltaion and software – including fonts. And I do sessional lecturing at UoReading.

The above didn’t meet our needs, so we made ScriptSource. This is designed to be a dynamic, collaborative website for meeting the needs of type designers dealing with the writing systems of the world.

Eg, look at Beria, an african script used by 169,000 people. eg, punjabi written in the gurmukhi script, what glyphs are needed. we can drill down to a character. we can see its unicode STATUS – ScriptScource can contain things not yet in unicode.

Its also useful for latin designers; Latin Extended-A is there.

There’s a “Add to ScriptScource” button on all pages, which allows anyone to contribute – submissions are moderated!

You can link to 3rd party sources, you can add to entries with various media, and you can register needs that are not yet met.

scripts + languages = writing systems, which lead to character sets, which are parts of scripts. this model is authoratitive. Ethnologue, ISO 639-3 for languages, ISO 15924 for scripts, Unicode and CLDR (common locale data repository, an industry wide, vetted source of locale information, run by unicode consortium) and the SIL PUA.

…

Roadmap: Comments, discussions, topics, FEEDS and APIS! please talk to me about that!

The lac of organized informatin is a problem for our communityy, and we hope you will conttribute your own amazing knowledge to this resource for the world

lorp Q: state of API?

A: RESTful JSON

Dave Q: what is the license for the core data?

A: it depends on the license used by the information providers. we dont impose a license.

Q: who else funds this?

A: 6 people over last few years at SIL did this. our long term vision is to get it run by an academic consortium, and there was interest by they wanted to see it concrete.

Georg Seifert (German Mafia): Smart Font Creation App for Designers

I am a type designer, Graublau Sans and Slab, and Olivegreen Mono; I love extensive and playful cursive forms. Rosa Stencil. Fraktur Rosenrot, unfinished project to match the latin evolution to blackletter; I recently did a typeface and pictograms for the Berlin airport!

Glyphs is my font editor. I want to HELP the designer as much as possible, and hide a lot of the technical stuff that we have to deal with these days. I encourage users to give up control to gain speed. Its about DESIGNING. Removing technical stuff.

I added keyboard shortcuts for many things, and I have a nice ‘reconnect splines’ tool to add back overlaps that are usually removed.

I have Petr van Blokland’s idea of moving bezier handles incrementally.

I have a ‘cursive’ way of slanting that isn’t a simple slant.

I have a diacritic ‘cloud’ preview

the glyph table is versatile, with coloring, export flags

There is python script support, eg this ‘beowolferize’ script.

It has small caps autokerning

This is Jan Gerner’s arabic, released at FontShop. the anchor positions work similarly to the latin diacritic clouds.

there is a Mutliple Master style interpolation. set up masters, then set up instances, and you can see different instances in the glyph editing window via the layers palette. There is a cats cradle view of the masters stacked, so you can see that each point is interpolating correclty.

There are timestamped/named layer versions, a poor designers versioning system. There’s also a dimensions notepad to remind you what stem distances are.

there’s a measuring tool

Q: PC versions?

A: No, its based on Cocao so no chance.

Q: Price?

A: €239 via paypal, $299 on Apple App Store

Q: no support for TT outlines?

A: no, its so rare that designers use them. i generate OTFs and they can be converted elsewhere. I see that as post production.

Q: do you do anything if you are distributing OTFs?

A: I ship to customers what Glyphs exports (its wrapping adobe FDK makeotf)

Evening Event

John Berry: Thanks to all our local hosts. This space is great! ATypI has brought type people together since 1957 and larger events recently have been great. 57 was metal type and early phototype. The business has changed a lot, people on the bus now chat about fonts, and there’s a lot of ignorance too. ATypI is educational. many kinds of writing systems that need new fonts, and making things all work together in a global system of communication. We’re also here for our own education and to enjoy where we are. I’d like to introduce the President of Iceland.

H.E. Olafur Ragnar Grimsson: Thanks. Welcome to this extraordinary building, one of the largest artworks in the world that happens to have a concert hall inside. A fantastic location, where design, inspiration, nature and mathematics is on display. An old school friend is a mathematical and perhaps design brain behind the artwork. Its true that even if you are a great artist, its difficult to work alone. People have to come together to create an extraordinary piece of art. This is the first time I’ve been asked to make a speech about a single letter. Some speculation is building about if I will run again for President. Delivering such a speech, may fuel such speculation, because for respect for the alphabet I should not step down until I am finished. I’m not sure if a head of state has delivered a speech, dedicated to a single letter. Our country has enjoyed a good design community lately, in design, textile, industrial and graphic – we have seen extraordinary progress. A young generation taking a strong interest. We’ve also seen type design become a fascinating field for our designers. Greek temples and roman coins to iPad and Kindle. … Your conference brings a new aspect to this arena, there is a prevalance of English, so characters not used in English are something of a curiosity. But they are a key piece of linguistic and national identity. The languages of the alphabet of small communities need to fight for their place. In the year 2000 we wanted to celebrate the 2,000 year old discovery

Microsoft refused to make Windows available to users less than 1,000,000 speakers. I wrote to Microsoft to say it would be a pity if Windows didn’t support a language used in North America 2,000 years ago. It demonstrated, not language imperialism, but insensitivity to small communities with different traditions, who have to fight for a right to use their own language in a world dominated by globalisation. We see an umlout, then we think it is German, Hungarian, Swedish, Danish… there are a limited number of nations who could claim that letter. When we see a german S we know its german. But an eth and a thorn, these are unique letters, and belong only to the old icelandic language. we are proud we have these letters. it reminds us that we share it with the anglo saxon and the old english heritage. its not solely icelandic, and we are still part of the culture and alphabet from the nordic countries, across iceland and greenland to america and into russia too, 1,000 years ago. when the vikings replaced their ruins with the roman alphabet.

for a society to keep exclusive and beautiful letters like eth and thorn, the language is the foundation of the nation, can be a mixed blessing. traveling around the world, when we use a computer in a hotel room, the keyboard doesnt recognise the existance of these letters. when no one understands what we are talking about, we talk to people back home in a way that seems silly, with our letters missing. in global work, it can be awkward for officials and interpreters to deal with these letters that they ay have never seen before. a meet highly educated people in top positions can’t understand why we use such ‘old’ and ‘outdated’ letters.

but its not just a part of our language. its a contribution to our humanity’s choir of languages. i hope you will broaden coverage of your type designs to this language. we can’t take modern progress to old letters; ask your host to bring an icelandic computer dictionary. we translated computer concepts, where most languages use the english term. these letters are integral to our modern computer usage. i hope you have a fascinating time, that this building inspires you, and you will not just stay in this box but go outside and

The process of creation is still going on, and here the forces of nature – earthwquake, nrew islands, glacial floods, volcanoes – you get a sense from early youth that the environemtn is in flux and creation is new. many nations have the book of genesis’ idea of creation that the almighty made the world in 6 days and rested because the work was finished, is a strange notion. here in iceland, we know, that not true the process of creation is still going on, and the almighty is still having a fantastic time continuing the creation.

Gunnlaugur SE Briem: Keynote presentation

John Berry: This talk has no useful information. He is from iceland although he lives in the USA now.

Gunnlaugur: Here are 2 observations that are not original: life is wonderful, and we are doomed. Love and cherish while we can. People who work with the alphabet see the world in a narrow keyhole. The Vinland map is fine, but $300,000 is a lot. This roman headstone is fine ,but we look at the spacing of the R. In ‘Utopia’, family size is strictly regulated. we are intereste din peple with a written culture. mesopotimia gets a metion for inventing writing, and had strong mail men Egyptians invented a fine alphabet. The heiroglyph for writing became phenetician, and eventually the M.

Mayans also had signs for writing. Xian missionaries nearly burned every book, a few examples survived.

…

There are greek ideas of mathematical proportions that are pretty, they dont always match nature as they are famous for.

Only 4 or 5 manuscripts survive from ancient rome. The trajan column was made after resource stripping what is now romania. htey mined gold

The roman empire had a rich tradition. early cursives attempted to write captials fast, and the D became d, the ‘f’ has a top serif because its an entry stroke. The tiber valley brought material for roman buildings.

…

I use Font Studio on Mac os 9

…

line length, the hypnomachia has a line length of 60 chars. gutenberg has 2 narrow cols that need a lot of hyphens.

…

computers often dont place the right quote marks, or hyphens are not case sensitive.

…

there are books with rules of typography, the chicago manual of style, the elements of style,

…

This blog post is a re-publication of an original article by Dave Crossland, submitted to Libre Graphics Magazine for Issue #0.

“Why make new fonts?” is the most common question I am asked since I set off to become a typeface designer. When I mention I did a Masters degree in the subject, at the University of Reading, England, I sometimes meet genuine surprise that this subject is studied seriously. Often people haven’t ever thought about where fonts come from, since the fonts on their computer are just there, you know?

We see different fonts out in the world constantly, so we all know there sure are a lot of them and why we need more isn’t obvious. Perhaps the surprise also stems from the way fonts are subliminal. We focus on the meaning of what we read, and that directs our perception away from the underlying mechanics of reading. Common everyday things can be quite mysterious when you come to examine them for the first time, and reading seems to be one of them.

New fonts are made for many reasons, and often several are involved at the same time. Here’s three:

Identity

Organisations need visual identities, and fonts can strongly identify who published what. Having a distinctive visual identity is to be fashionable. Fashion makes life more interesting, and is as much as part of typography as any other aspect of culture. While you can achieve a very distinctive visual identity with a very common font – the popularity of “Helvetica” is testament to that – I suggest that this is the prime motivation graphic designers desire new fonts today; its why typographers license new retail fonts, and corporate branding projects commission bespoke fonts. Such commissions can fail to be enough justification for more than a single font, not a whole family – just extending a logotype into a full alphabet. Sometimes it can result in big families though, and this year Canonical has commissioned a very big family of fonts from the Dalton-Maag foundry in London.

Art

While type designers cater to the desire of their customers, they also have a mind of their own and that mind usually has an artistic bent. There’s that basic urge to self expression, expressing emotions through letter forms, and that whole George Mallory thing: “Because its there.”

The power of “I made this!” shouldn’t be underestimated. It underpins why I became a type designer. Victor Gaultney, the designer of the libre font family Gentium, is also a trained musician and he said simply, “Why make new fonts? Why make new music?”

There’s a business side to type design as artistic practice, too. I’ve heard seasoned professionals like Matthew Carter and Gerard Unger mention that during their career they were constantly working on fonts for themselves, privately. When a graphic designer incubates a little ‘secret stash’ like this, when a commission comes along and these private designs are relevant, they can be refined to meet the brief – boosting turnaround time and the bottom line.

Whatever kind of design your are doing, if you try to design without any constraints and only from self expression, you’re not really engaged in design, you’re engaged in Art. The initial motivation might well be indistinguishable from the needs of users of the final design artifact, but I think it is a qualitatively different kind of process. What really anchors type design as a design process, is this:

Design

Fonts can help or hinder the legibility of text. Raph Levien made Inconsolata for typesetting program code, a real niche. Typefaces for code are typically designed for reading on screens rather than in print since that’s really where code lives. This typographic context directs the design in several ways, such as to make the brackets unconventionally big because they have a key role in code. Those brackets are not appropriate for, say, a telephone directory.

When Matthew Carter designed Bell Centennial for AT&T in the 1970s, he made a new typeface for telephone directories that would be used at very small sizes, that would get more text per line, and yet that would remain just as legible as the old one. The typographic context is different, and the brackets’ designs are different. This is subtle stuff, subliminal even to many graphic designers, but this is the stuff that really pays for type design – because it is what makes excellent typography, and it pays for itself many times over. When you’re printing 50,000 copies, getting 10% more text into 50 fewer pages than the last edition saves a lot of money.

Freedom

And this illustrates why libre fonts are so valuable. If you’re using a font and it doesn’t quite work as you wish – if it takes up too much space, or if it doesn’t feel right, or it could be made a bit more cool and contemporary – can you change it? If you’re using a proprietary font, you can’t. Well, you can always make a new typeface that has similar qualities, from scratch. But with a libre font, you can take it in new directions that the original developers never would have thought of straight away.