Drawn linked to this set of posters by Noma Bar that make clever use of negative space, and they reminded me of an image I’ve had saved on my computer since last year, this poster for the Humana Festival by Tomer Hanuka, below. It doesn’t need any explanation, I just love it — the image is beautifully conceived and rendered. You can read more about its development on Hanuka’s site, Tropical Toxic.
I would tweak the type a little bit thought, especially the ‘31st’ — for some reason the height of the 3 hasn’t been optically adjusted, making it look much smaller than the 1. It’s rather odd that was done like that.
This has nothing to do with type (well, not much) but I found it so remarkable I want to post about it anyway. Alex Roman has created a series of CG images and short films, based on real places, with a remarkable level of realism and beauty. At first I thought they’d been filmed and photographed with some high quality HD SLR, and wondered at the air of hyper-realism some of them have, especially the second one in this set. The sound design and visuals are great, but the use of type in the videos is rather odd and to my eye adds a small, if jarring, discordant note to the whole project: I’ve come across people mixing upper- and lower-case and using extreme kerning before (not so much kerning as tangling in this case) and it’s rarely successful. Still, to harp on about that would seem churlish as the rest of the project is so good. Some stills below to whet your appetite, and the project website is here.
Yves Peters wrote recently on the history and origins of the FontShop-released FF Dagny, worth reading in full, especially for the interesting discussion at the end on how to categorise the face. I must admit though to being drawn in by the beautiful illustration by Fredrik Andersson, reproduced below. One of the key features in the development of Dagny was to create a true italic for it, rather than the obliques of its ‘parent’ face, DN Grotesk, so it’s especially pleasing to align italic characters across the illustration like this.
Illustration by Fredrik Andersson for the FF Dagny spec sheet.
Whenever I’ve seen this car around Brighton it’s either been very dark or I’ve not had a (decent) camera with me, so it was good the other day to see it sat there in full sunshine, and me with a proper camera too. Too few people decorate their cars, fearing perhaps for the resale value, but seeing this car I can’t help but wish more people would have a go. Whoever you are who did this, thanks!
Whenever I’m playing around with guilloches, I often think it’d be nice to make an alphabet - to actually generate letterforms with them. It’d mean loads of eye-wateringly complex formulæ, but I think it’d be worth it. Well, Tania Alvarez has created some beautiful letters called Fabric Type that convey some much of the appeal and intricacy of guilloche patterns and reminded me instantly of that idea. If ever I needed reminding that the products of inspiration are infinitely variable, then it’s this; these are beautiful and I love them, but I’m happy to see that they’re different from what I was thinking of doing. This list of things that I want to get done isn’t getting any shorter. Found via the ever-inspirational Fubiz.
Browsing Behance the other day I came across the portfolio of Andrew van der Merwe, a calligrapher and letterer from Cape Town. These sand lettering pieces he’s done are really beautiful - the edges of the letters are so clean and the forms so precise, there’s definitely a technique going on here, which he confirms:
Scratching in the sand with a stick, however, has proved less than satisfactory because it makes more of a mess than a mark. This has led me, over the past seven years, to develop various instruments which mark the sand in less messy ways, and ultimately to a kind of scoop which leaves neat V-cut letters of the sort one gets in stone carving.Andrew van der Merwe
Lovely stuff. Go and have a look. There’s his Behance portfolio here, and a site which desperately needs some attention here.
It’s Nice That linked to this great piece on Amusement magazine, telling the ‘real’ story of how the iconic figures and objects in videogames were made. I love the idea of these things being made in a workshop - the pong one below is great. It took me a moment to recognise the Mario mushrooms being carved out of stone, but boy, if someone ever was to make them that way I know of quite a few people who’d want to buy one.
It seems hardly a week goes by lately without some interesting new development in online typography. For years there has been a constant grumble from many that the web needs more typefaces available to designers to create great online typography, and there’s been a consistent, and entirely correct (but perhaps rather hardline) response from others that great typography doesn’t come from having lots of typefaces. Perhaps you can tell from that which side I come down on, and yes, it is rather hardline, and I freely and happily admit that as a response to the problem it rather misses the point.
You can, of course, create great typography using only one or two typefaces for your entire working career as a designer. I’ve met a few designers who seem to want to do just that, and indeed, I heard a story of a creative director so obsessed with Bembo that he wouldn’t allow any other face to be used on anything, so that none of the designers who worked with him could ever bear to use it ever again. Most of us, like those very designers, would quite reasonably get bored to death with using the same faces all the time. No matter how beautiful, how perfect, how utterly balanced the typeface was, you can have too much of a good thing, eventually - and if the faces you have available are, shall we say, of mixed quality, then you can feel rather stifled, rather quickly.
This is the situation we’re in now. We’ve had the ‘Web Core Fonts’ for seemingly forever, and we’re fed up with them. There are so many excellent screen faces out there, and we want to use them. But how? I won’t seek to repeat some excellent articles on the current state of play (I suggest you read this article on ilovetypography.com), but I fancied including some of the context, the history of how we’ve used non-core faces online until now, and my own opinions one where it’s all going.
Making images of text yourself
Slow and tedious, not very accessible and relatively inflexible, this isn’t really a solution at all, but is certainly the most reliable way of presenting text in your own typeface online. It’s getting less common thanks to the growth of various other methods, but still hangs around for obvious reasons: You can fine-tune everything - the kerning, ligatures, alternates, all sorts of effects, it’s all under your control. Sounds great, until you have to change the text. Then you have to fine tune it all again, save off all the images again, upload all the images again, then try and work out why you’ve got a broken image on your site again until you remember you changed the filename when you were in a hurry that time and you forgot about it…. So, it’s good for things you don’t change often.
Making images of text automatically
For many years this seemed a golden solution, lit by a kind of heavenly light from within, choirs of angels and all that: all the benefits of making images yourself, but without all the fuss and effort! Joy! Well, not quite. There are various methods for creating the images automatically, from using a desktop application like Fireworks to online PHP libraries (and similar), and they all have their limitations. The first, of course, is that you’re creating the images automatically so you don’t have quite so much control over how the type looks, and most of the PHP libraries I’ve seen over the years don’t support kerning, which is a bit of a showstopper if you care about such things, and if you don’t care, why are you doing this anyway? Also, like creating the images yourself, you still end up with folders full of loads of tiny files, and your pages will be slower as a result of the browser having to request each of those files individually. Not ideal in other words.
Live replacement with Flash or SVG
And here we find some very clever solutions, the most widespread being Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, or sIFR (yes, with a small ‘s’). This technique uses a combination of Javascript and CSS to replace text with a Flash movie showing that same text but instead using a font embedded within the movie. When used for small amounts of text, such as a couple of headlines on your page here and there, it can work very well, hence its popularity.
There are some benefits to using sIFR: You can choose a subset of characters to include, which can keep the filesize of the Flash movie fairly low; and as it’s not the actual font file you’re embedding, it adds a barrier of security to people who might want to rip it off (how high a barrier that is remains debatable), and, as with all Flash movies, you can block the file from being reimported back into the Flash editor (again, with debatable efficacy).
There are also some real problems with using sIFR. The main one is speed. If you use it for any amount of text you’ll notice quite a lag while the text is replaced and the Flash movies rendered. Using it for a lot of text, such as the body of an article, and you will most likely notice a significant performance hit on your browser, or a crash. It can also be blocked by ad-blocking software - I use Click2Flash on Safari and I haven’t set it to allow (or disallow) all sIFR, just in case, so I often see placeholders all over pages. The other main problem, and it doesn’t particularly affect users, is that it is a fairly brittle, poorly documented and really annoyingly bitty solution - it’s an absolute pain in the arse to set up, basically.
Another option very much worthy of mention (and I’m not going to cover every single one) is Cufón. This works by using Fontforge to convert a TrueType or OpenType font file to, essentially, a Javascript file. Naturally there’s a little bit more to it, which you can read on the Github page should you wish. The setup is extraordinarily simple, the rendering of the type is extremely fast, even when used on a lot of text, and works with straighforward CSS rules. It’s not absolutely perfect, as there are a few issues with Internet Explorer (no surprises there) and there are some concerns that the font file can be reassembled from the Cufón file - though the technological barrier to that is enough to defeat most people.
Of which questions of licensing and piracy leads nicely onto…
Directly linking to the font file on your server
Basically, you upload a font file to your server and link to it on your web page or stylesheet and when someone views your page, the font gets downloaded, interpreted, and your text is then displayed using it. Simple. Well, kind of. Since version 5, Internet Explorer has supported the font-face rule, allowing you to link to a proprietary file format, Embedded OpenType (EOT), which allows for subsetting (like sIFR does), proprietary compression and a simple form of DRM to limit the file to use on certain domains. This format was never supported by other browser makers, and foundries never explicitly allowed for the use of their typefaces in this format, so it never took off. In many circles, it was viewed as a Bad Thing, another attempt by Microsoft to foist proprietary technologies onto the web, and further evidence of how evil they were. Though perhaps if you subscribe to that view you might want to look up who commissioned the Core Web Fonts in the first place. Verdana and Georgia are bloody great (on screen).
So, we went many years with a partial solution available, but never used. Recently, however, a couple of new proposals have emerged. One is the .webfont proposal by Tal Leming and Erik van Blokland, which seeks to create a format-independent XML wrapper for fonts, with compression for the font data itself. The XML wrapper contains various data, including allowed URLs, the license and origin, and anything else the foundry wants to put in there.
Essentially, the XML wrapper in .webfont is a form of DRM. It contains the license, and if you ignore it and rip off the font file, then you’re open to prosecution. It’s true Digital Rights Management rather than Digital Rights Enforcement.
Interestingly, there isn’t any restrictive DRM (Digital Rights Management), obfuscation or encryption in the format. DRM is a tricky one. I’ve never been entirely against it as a concept, but more against the appallingly greedy, grasping, restrictive, anti-consumer, anti-liberty, anti-fair-use moneygrabbing application of it the music industry employed. I don’t rip off music or movies, and yet my use of my media is limited by these restrictions - it’s insane, so I can see why the idea of adding any form of DRM to font files is now beyond the pale, even though with typefaces it could, arguably, be justified. The only option is to keep educating people that they’re not free, that they take time to design and perfect, and that yes, if caught, you can be prosecuted. Kids and enthusiasts building massive font collections they’ll never use are one thing, but professionals should, and must, know better.
Anyway, I digress. The other proposal getting attention is EOT Lite. This is a resurrection of Microsoft’s original EOT format, but with the DRM-like restrictions and patented compression methods removed. This makes it a reasonably credible addition to the options available as it is already supported by a major browser, but whether it can overcome the poor start (and worse publicity) EOT had is doubtful. While .webfont has the support of most of the larger and important foundries, a couple of big foundries have backed EOT Lite. Well, that is until halfway through me writing this article when Typegirl tweeted that Adobe are backing the .webfont proposal. We shall see, and of course there’s no problem with a foundry supporting multiple solutions. Certainly Linotype have already added EOT to their EULA, which is great news as it signals that one of the biggest barriers to using different faces online, licensing for web use, is actually now being overcome.
And, with that other nice link on licensing, we move to…
Subscription: Using the font file on someone else’s server
Typekit’s list of typefaces. Cropped from this screenshot. Yes, I recoloured it too.
Now this is really exciting, and has implications for font licensing for the desktop as well as online. You pay a subscription, and you get access to a variety of typefaces you can use on your site. With Typekit, the process is handled using Javascript to enable the font in the browser, which you then refer to in your stylesheet using standard CSS rules. Other services, whether from foundries, resellers or dedicated service providers, will no doubt develop their own systems, but I imagine they’re be all along similar lines. The question for me is one of performance. I don’t know about you, but I’ve occasionally been left waiting for a page to load while the browser waits for a response from, say, google-analytics.com - there’s no question Google’s main analytics web servers are down (not this often anyway), but just that sometimes this happens on the web. How would this affect a page using Typekit? Is there any option for local server caching for example? If so, how would that be handled?
I’ve often thought that a subscription model for typefaces would be ideal for agencies, designers and printers - people who need access at short notice, and for short periods to a wide range of faces. At the moment, there’s a lot of dodgy emailing of font files about, and you can bet that no matter how scrupulous at licensing everyone concerned may be, that a lot of these font files stay installed and end up being used beyond their licenses. Foundries, and for agencies, etc. concerned about their liabilities to prosecution (and of course, for doing the right thing) would welcome a system that allows you to get access to a face for a week, or a month, or whatever, and, most importantly, to change what they have access to whenever they need to. To make it work you’d have to be paying less per font (or even per face) than for a full license, but for the foundries this would represent a consistent income, rather than no income at all. It’s a thought. I’d certainly use it.
The Future
The whole push to develop practical ways using typefaces online is inevitable given how many applications are now moving into ‘the cloud’. We’ve word processors and photo editing applications online now, and it’ll only be a matter of time before professional creative tools go online too. We want to be able to access our documents from anywhere, and for them to use the same faces as we created them with, and for these documents, the web core fonts aren’t going to do the job.
With the online subscription model, there is a cautionary note to keep in mind - you don’t have control over what’s available. As Kindle users who thought they’d bought Orwell’s 1984 recently found out, if your service provider doesn’t want you to have it anymore, you have no say in the matter. At least if you have the font file on your own machine or your own server, you can keep using it even if the company you bought it from no longer wants to sell it. We’ll no doubt see both honourable and dis-honourable business practices, some scandals, some interesting legal actions, and probably new primary legislation on the matter, but until then, as ever, caveat emptor.
I’ve been following Penny Arcade for quite some time now - they run commentary and opinion on games with short articles and webcomics, expertly written and drawn by Gabe and Tycho. They’ve recently been running a series of webcomics exploring various short stories (not strictly on gaming, but perhaps in universes shared with many games), one of which is Automata. It’s all rather good and worth following (part 1 here, 2 onwards from here), but one thing that got my attention was the representation of speech between the automata characters, shown below.
I like the addition of the dots to the barcode pattern, hinting at multiple tones and levels of sound - something interesting to add to a script - and as the character in the comic refers to it as ‘clickwise’ I got to wondering how languages with clicks were transcribed in the real world. Unsurprisingly, there are various forms of dots, circles and exclamation points, forming a kind of visual onomatopœia for clicks, ‘tsks’ and ‘tuts’.
Comics of course have a rich vocabulary of such things, and I find myself sometimes wishing for a bit more symbolic depth to the Latin alphabet - new forms of punctuation perhaps, maybe even a whole new script, or scripts. To illustrate and explain further, I think everyone has come across the problem of misinterpreting or being misinterpreted when using email - you thought you were making an oh-so-clever dry witticism and it comes across as scouring contemptuous sarcasm (say), so usually the only recourse is to pick up the phone so that your tone of voice can be heard. However, since we’re increasingly using text to communicate, especially in the social, rather than business or technical, arena, and even more importantly in the plain text and short form media such as SMS, we may need to expand our symbolic vocabulary to indicate things such as tone of voice, humour, sarcasm and sincerity. We have emoticons of course, and in time some of them (beyond 263A, 263B and so on) may find their way into Unicode, but they’re pretty blunt things and as it’s subtlety we need, we’ll need something a bit more flexible and, well, more like language.
Only yesterday I posted about cities, maps and dense architecture, and I find this on NOTCOT - Instant Hutong. It’s an art project to both record and to bring to people’s attention the traditional patterns of neighbourhoods, courtyards and lanes in Beijing - under threat from development (of course). When I saw the small picture on NOTCOT, I thought it was actually close-set lettering as the main streets appear to form natural ‘baselines’ in the dense pattern of buildings. Interestingly, one of the pieces in the project is a collection of name stamps, set with small chunks of the street pattern - bringing to mind the idea of the built environment as being part of people’s identity, a kind of language they use in interacting with the city and the world. To lose that language, the structures of the city, the place where you grew up, is to lose a part of your identity - not a particularly controversial or new idea, but definitely worth reminding ourselves of from time to time.
