Friday May 21, 2010
Filed under:
Font News
Diane Script and Filmotype Honey
If you pay close attention, you may notice two additions to the list of fonts over on the right side of the page: Diane Script and Filmotype Honey. I’ve been meaning to add these for a while (a long while in the case of Diane Script).
Diane Script (and Diane Script Première) were released in late 2008 through FontHaus, who commissioned me to digitize them. More about Diane here.
Filmotype Honey is my latest contribution to the Filmotype project and was released on the Font Bros site back in February.
Friday May 7, 2010
Filed under:
Miscellany
Links
The Daily Pangram
Craig Eliason has been writing a pangram almost every day for over two years on his site The Daily Pangram. For the last week, they’ve been about me or my fonts, which is quite an honor.
Pangrams are tricky enough to write without having to keep track of all the letters, so Craig uses my Pangrammer Helper so he can focus on the creative part of the task. He’s gotten quite good at it.
Craig and I both work in St. Paul, so we see each other from time to time, traveling in similar circles (he teaches art history at the University of St. Thomas and is learning to design type).
I should really just end this with a pangram, except I can’t quite think of any words that fit that have a z. Hmm…
Thursday March 4, 2010
Filed under:
Old Type & Lettering
Big, Swashy P
Large (about 6 inches tall) wood type “P”, seen at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, Two Rivers, Wisconsin, on March 31, 2009.
Wednesday March 3, 2010
Filed under:
Son of Typecasting
Mis-Taken
Reader Ivan Philipov sent me this still from Steven Spielberg’s 2002 science fiction television series “Taken”. The newspaper is supposed to be from 1947, but the headline font, Adobe Myriad, didn’t exist until 1992.
Sunday February 28, 2010
Filed under:
Recent Work
Technique
Beneath the Volley of the Fonts
Last Friday, I spent the afternoon frantically trading files with Peter Bruhn (of Fountain type foundry in Sweden) for an exhibition match of Layer Tennis. The basic idea is to pass a layered Photoshop file back and forth for ten “volleys”, about one every 15 minutes. The resulting “volley” image is displayed live for the world to see, with running commentary (in this case by the witty and capable Grant Hutchinson).
What may not have been obvious to some was that the Photoshop compositions were not where Peter and I were spending most of our time (well, maybe in some cases it was obvious). In fact, we were designing, building and generating fonts in FontLab, and then using them in Photoshop. With most of the volleys, we started from the font that had been built in the previous one.
Although the images created in Photoshop were the ultimate public face of the match, I thought it might be interesting to show what was going on behind the scenes with the fonts.
To make it easier to tell what was going on, I’ve color-coded the glyphs:
- Green = new glyphs
- Purple = modified glyphs
- Gray = unmodified glyphs.
Volley 1: “jam” I got the coin toss, so I went first. I created a font with three simple glyphs in a sort of bloopy geometric style.
Volley 2: “your ham” Peter followed up by ably adding several more glyphs in the same style.
Volley 3: “more homey” I modified all the existing glyphs to create a higher-contrast semi-serif design. (You can see more clearly in this version that the basic construction is that of an upright italic.)
Volley 4: “möre” Peter takes it in a different direction, more like a Bodoni or Didot, and adds a whimsical swash and umlaut. He also takes advantage of the fact that he only really needs to change enough glyphs to spell the word he wants to use in the image, in this case “more”. Both of us adopt this strategy as the game progresses.
Volley 5: “major surgery” I continue the transformation to a Didone style, conforming several other glyphs and adding a g and an s.
Volley 6: “no sanity” Peter changes the direction, this time deconstructing several glyphs and doing a “serif-ectomy”. Note the nod to my Coquette in the o.
Volley 7: “faster!” I change the style again, albeit in an expeditious manner, by slanting all the glyphs. I add an f and a ! and tweak a few existing glyphs. (Merely slanted glyphs are shown in light purple.)
Volley 8: “aefghijm” Peter does something “meta” by printing out and critiquing an unslanted version of font.
Volley 9: “redesign” I discard my cheap slanting trick from volley 7 and, starting from the font in volley 6, change it into a slab serif for my final volley.
Volley 10: “bye!” Peter takes my slanted font from volley 7 and gives it a more cursive flair, with a reprise of the Coquette reference. According to Peter, the “waving” exclamation point was a happy accident. Works for me.
In the end, we had created ten new fonts in a few hours. Not complete, full-featured fonts, or the best-built fonts in the world, but good enough to set some type. I set them all together to show the sum of what we made:
Now comes the hard part: Coming up with a name for it….
(Thanks to Peter Bruhn, and Jim Coudal and Bryan Bedell of Coudal Partners.)
Thursday February 25, 2010
Filed under:
Links
Recent Work
Layer Tennis
Just a note to say, this Friday afternoon, I’ll be pitting my type chops against (with?) fellow type designer Peter Bruhn for a “exhibition” game of Layer Tennis. I expect this to be a friendly match, more improvisational than competitive. But we’ll see.
Friday January 1, 2010
Filed under:
Old Type & Lettering
The End of 2009
Appropriately enough for the end of the year, the Movie Title Stills Collection now has a set of “The End” titles from Warner Bros. movies, from 1925 (the earliest available on DVD) to 1967 (when the practice ended). As usual, these are nearly all hand lettered. There is some consistency to the designs, almost as if it were treated as logos. This may have been done on purpose, as a way of branding the pictures, but it seems more likely that is was simple expediency, reusing the same artwork to save time and money, with variations reflecting the shifting tastes over time of the artists involved.
Sunday November 15, 2009
Filed under:
Son of Typecasting
Mad Men Mention
I was quoted and my site was mentioned in an article by Alice Rawsthorn in today’s New York Times. If you’ve come here looking for my Mad Men piece, it’s here:
Titanic was also mentioned:
For more obsessive nitpicking about type in movies and television (more fun than it sounds), see Son of Typecasting.
Tuesday November 10, 2009
Filed under:
Old Type & Lettering
Neckties
Seen in an antique store in Osseo, Wisconsin, on August 14, 2009.
Monday November 2, 2009
Filed under:
Type Industry
Web Design
Ars Technica on WOFF
Chris Foresman, at Ars Technica, has written a nice, informative piece about WOFF (Web Open Font Format).
Tuesday October 20, 2009
Filed under:
Font News
Type Industry
WOFF, a.k.a. Web Fonts
Mozilla announced today that it is going to include support for WOFF fonts, a font format designed for use on the Web, in Firefox version 3.6. I support this format and plan to allow my distributors to license WOFF fonts to customers.
At this point, Firefox is the only browser to support this format, so it’s not quite ready for prime-time yet. But there is a lot of support for this in the font industry, and hopefully the other major browser makers, Apple and Microsoft, will join in soon.
Friday October 9, 2009
Filed under:
Font News
Anonymous Pro 1.001 Released
I’m pleased to announce the release of Anonymous Pro Version 1.001. This version contains mostly user-requested tweaks and fixes, including:
- The comma and the comma part of the semicolon have been moved down about a pixel (depending on the size) to improve clarity.
- The design of the “quotesinglbase” and “quotedblbase” match the look of the “straight” quotes (the earlier designs didn’t match anything).
- The periods and other “dot” punctuation elements are a bit bigger in some bitmap sizes/styles.
- Fixed the hinting problem that caused the tops of the caps to vary in height a certain sizes on Windows (hard to figure out the reason, but easy to fix once I knew).
- Corrected the 13ppem bitmap glyph for the Greek character “omicrontonos” (which, embarrassingly, sported an umlaut).
And last, but not least:
- I dropped my old DIY license and switched to the SIL Open Font License, which should make a lot of users in the open source community happy.
Small note to Windows users: I haven’t updated the sample that shows what Anonymous Pro looks like in text sizes on Windows with ClearType enabled. It looks better than that now. I’ll update it soon.
Monday August 24, 2009
Filed under:
Links
Type History
Typedia is Here
Typedia, a shared, online encyclopedia of typefaces, just launched today.
It’s the brainchild of Jason Santa Maria, who invited me to contribute when it was in its early planning stage. I helped mostly with the classification system. (I actually have mixed feelings about classification systems in general and I think the tags will be ultimately more useful. But the classifications will at least provide a starting point.)
I’m very excited about Typedia. I’m hoping it will be the online equivalent of resources like Matt McGrew’s American Metal Typefaces of the Twentieth Century or Jaspert, Berry & Johnson’s Encyclopeadia of Type Faces, two books I rely on when I want to know the history of a typeface (see my Son of Typecasting series).
However, unlike a printed book, Typedia will be continuously updated and will grow in its usefulness as more and more people contribute to it.
Friday July 31, 2009
Filed under:
Links
Type Industry
Type Radio Video
Type Radio is my favorite podcast. Now there is a video about it. So, that’s what they look like. (Thanks to Paul Hunt for posting a link to the video on WeLoveTypography.)
Friday July 24, 2009
Filed under:
Old Type & Lettering
Best Movie Title Site Yet
A while back, I posted a link to one of my favorite site’s, Steven Hill’s Movie Title Screens Page, “shillpages” for short. As wonderful as it is, there’s an even better one: Christian Annyas’ The Movie Title Stills Collection. It has a lot of the same material, but it’s much better organized, and also includes end titles and trailer titles.
One thing to keep in mind: Nearly all the titles that were done before the 1960s were hand lettered. Type was just too inflexible and limiting back then, so it was standard procedure to hire a lettering artist. In other words, don’t ask me what “font” was used for The Big Sleep or The Thin Man. Incidentally, if you want lettering, I can help with that.
(A big thanks to Johno of I Love Typography and We Love Typography for telling me about the Annyas site.)
Monday July 6, 2009
Filed under:
Font News
Introducing Mostra Nuova
Mostra (2001) was originally conceived as a caps-only font. The source for its inspiration, lettering on Italian Art Deco posters from the 1930s, rarely included lowercase letters. Nevertheless, not long after I released it, I started thinking about what a lowercase for it might look like.
As OpenType fonts grew in popularity and acceptance, an OpenType version of Mostra, with its many alternate characters, seemed inevitable. Separating the alternates across three fonts for each weight was the only practical solution back in 2001. This worked okay, until you wanted to combine alternates from the separate fonts. It’s simply not possible to provide kerning pairs between characters in different fonts. And I did intend for the fonts to be used in this way, not only as separate fonts.
When it came time to develop an OpenType version of Mostra, combining the three fonts into one was the main idea, and it would have been simple enough to go that route, but then I remembered the idea of adding a lowercase. After making some trial designs, I decided it was worth the extra effort.
Of course, it takes time to add all those new characters, and the mind tends to wander. Before I finished designing the lowercase, I had thought of even more alternate characters for the uppercase. And, of course, many of these required analogs for the lowercase as well. Upshot: Lots of new characters.
And then I decided to add a sixth weight. I’d been looking at some hairline fonts for some reason and I suddenly thought, wouldn’t it be great if Mostra Nuova had a hairline weight? Yes, it would.
Mostra had 26 capital letters plus 15 alternates. Mostra Nuova has 52 upper- and lowercase letters plus 40 alternates. In the original version, the number of possible letter pair combinations was 650. The number of letter pair combinations for Mostra Nova is 8372. This meant that the number of kerning pairs needed would increase by more than ten fold. Times six weights. This didn’t quite sink in until I was well into kerning. Did I mention that I thought I expected to be done last April? But it was worth it in the end.
Of course, Mostra Nuova has much better language support, covering most Latin-based languages in Western and Central Europe. It also has a special feature so that when you change something to all-caps, things like hyphens and bullets are automatically centered on the height of the caps rather than the lowercase.
All in all, Mostra Nuova is a much more versatile font than its predecessor. Available now.
Thursday June 11, 2009
Filed under:
Font News
Anonymous Pro Now Available
I announced back in April that a new version of my popular free font Anonymous™ would be available soon. That would be today.
Anonymous Pro is now available.
Monday June 8, 2009
Filed under:
Personal Archaeology
The Making of Kandal on LetterCult
Probably more than you ever wanted to know, but it was fun rummaging through my old stuff to piece the story together.
(Thanks, Brian!)
Monday May 11, 2009
Filed under:
Font Sightings
Son of Typecasting
Changeling Cast in Star Trek
I saw the new Star Trek movie this last night and was thrilled to spot one of my fonts, Changeling, in a supporting role. Here are some examples from a couple of high resolution publicity stills for the movie:
Changeling was a redesign and expansion of an old film font from the seventies called China. I added more weights, more styles, and more characters, as well as modifying the design as I saw fit. One of the more noticeable things I changed was the “4”, which is how I know it’s Changeling that was used in the film.
What’s funny about all this has to do with my choice of the name “Changeling”. It contains all the letters in the name “China” (I added things to it, get it?). A “changeling” refers to something that comes back in a different form, and this was a font coming back in a different form. It’s also the title of an episode from the original Star Trek t.v. show, something I was aware of when I chose the name—the sci-fi connection made me like the name even more, because of the way the font looks. Finally, that particular Star Trek episode was the basis for the first Star Trek movie.
Needless to say, I was in several kinds of geek heaven last night.
Friday May 1, 2009
Filed under:
Font News
Links
Veer Premieres "F is for Fail"
Proxima Nova stars in a new animated short film by Brent Barson, sponsored by Veer: “F is for Fail” (and co-starring Adobe’s Arno Pro). The still from the film (above) sums up my reaction. Well done, Brent! (And thanks to Veer, too.)
Thursday April 23, 2009
Filed under:
Font News
Links
Lakeside and Filmotype Zanzibar Favorited
I’m really honored to have my Lakeside and Filmotype Zanzibar among the 40 typefaces chosen in Typographica’s “Our Favorite Typefaces of 2008”. Thanks so much, Dyana and J.F.
I participate in this annual tradition from the other side of the fence as well. I chose Nick Shinn’s Modern Suite, which blew me away when I saw the specimen book for it at last year’s TypeCon in Buffalo.