This Week in Type: Bring in the Portuguese!

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Caflish Script @ Typekit, by Tiffany Wardle

This week, I’ve collected just a short selection of links. I’ve been occupied with other projects that involve programming a type inspired generative illustration in Processing, so it has been an off-week for Typography. I’ll post some screenshots on my portuguese blog soon. On the meanwhile, here are this week’s links:

First, a a very concise and well written article about using (Caflish) script type, by Tiffany Wardle—”a typographer and graphic designer currently living and working in San Jose, California”: http://blog.typekit.com/2011/11/02/about-face-caflisch-script/?mid=51. Via Tânia Raposo @ Type Shares.

Tânia also posted another interesting link on Type Shares—The work of Mathew Carter, by Fred Smeijers: http://www.hyphenpress.co.uk/journal/2011/11/01/the_work_of_matthew_carter. He is one of my favorite Type Designer of all time, if not my personal favorite… Smeijers is also a well known academic and designer. So this combination is very interesting ;)

 

Miguel Sousa (image from Foto Digital website)

Talking about Tiffany, one is almost instantly reminded of Miguel Sousa.

Daniel B. sent me this link some short (and partially correct?) information about my fellow compatriot: http://fotodigital-online.com/noticias/48-noticias/1573-um-portugues-no-photoshop.html. I was lucky enough to know him in the Dublin ATypI conference. Here’s a nice document from him: www.infoamerica.org/museo/pdf/guia_de_tipos01.pdf (in Portuguese…)

 

Avería, by Dan Sayers

This one really fascinate me. Avería, by Dan Sayers is a generated typeface, or putting it in proper terms, an extensive interpolation of 725 fonts:

Dan Sayers wondered what would happen if all the visual attributes of these typefaces were computationally averaged together [...] so it was perhaps inevitable that the idea came to me one day of ‘generative typography,’” he writes. After a month’s work with Imagemagick and PHP, Sayers had his result: Avería, “the average font.”

Although its motives and methodologies can be highly questionable, the fact that he pulled this off by using PHP and ImageMagick on a web server really amazed me! Not the best result, but a no doubt, a fun project: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665337/aver-a-a-free-typeface-made-by-averaging-725-fonts-together

 

Cover of Cadernos de Tipografia nr. 21, by Paulo Heitlinger

Finally, although I still haven’t read it, the last number of Cadernos de Tipografia (Typography Notebooks, roughly translated) is available for download: http://www.tipografos.net/cadernos/cadernos-21.html.

This is another Portuguese reading, but I think Google does a fair job translating it… I don’t agree with style of writing, and many of the opinions expressed by Paulo Heitlinger (the edition’s main author and editor). But he has to be praised by maintaining the huge effort of publishing a free, digital edition journal that has reached 21 issues!

 

This Week in Type: more type designers than ever!

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Fernando Melo working @ Fontsmith (© Process Made)

This edition of This Week in Type is late… But, better late than sorry. Without further delay, here are this week’s links.

First and foremost, here’s an interview with Fernando Melo (image above), one of the recent and most promising young Brazilian type designers working at Fontsmith. Although the interview script could be better, it’s always nice to see the opinion of people we admire.

There are probably 10 times more pro type designers nowadays than 20 years ago. A great part of them are young and talented. The challenge for creating innovative fonts will increase more and more in the future, unfortunately!

Nice pictures, great answers. Read it at Process Made: http://processmade.com/fernando-melo-from-font-smith-designing-fs-pimlico?mid=51478

Via Adriano Esteves @ Type Shares

 

Scored 84 @ Shape Type... not bad for a Typophile!

Speaking of type designers and their education, here’s a couple of links to some games developed to help web developers to learn more about type and typography:

Method of Action is peer to peer education for people who want to get things done. Learn by doing, participating and teaching.

Not only fun to use and play with, these are also great learning materials to use in classes. Shared by almost everyone I know (like Catarina S., João S., Pedro B., etc.), but seen first @FontShopBeNeLux

 

Typo 11 in retrospect (oficial website)

If you’re like me, and you’re feeling that you’ve lost a great conference Typo 11, here’s something that might cheer you up. Will Whit has collected a bunch of links on it: http://zootool.com/user/will6f/pack:typo%20london%202011

The official website has also a great collection of links and articles in retrospect: http://typolondon.com/blog/

 

Wim Crouwell @ Dutch Profiles

After watching Irma Boom’s video, here’s another great interview by Max Bruisma, from Dutch Profiles—Wim Crouwell. Although not as famous as Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, or Otl Aicher, he is, in my opinion, one of the most revolutionary (Type) Designers in the 20th century: http://www.youtube.com/user/DutchProfiles#p/u/1/4tG6CTHKg8g.

 

Letter.2 Website

Finally and well overdue here’s my public appreciation for Letter.2 Winners: http://letter2.org/

We are pleased to present the winning entries of the Letter.2 competition. The jury met in Buenos Aires on October 1st and 2nd 2011 to make a selection of 53 entries out of 561 submissions based on their design excellence.

I have to congratulate my friend and colleague in particular, the Portuguese type designer Rui Abreu, that was selected with two fonts: Aria (2011) and Orbe (2008). There are many other entries that I like, more than I can list here, but I think it’s worth mentioning the giant efforts of Slimbach/Adobe, the elegant clean-cuts from Veronika Burian, the plastic freedom of Laura Messeger, and many, many others…

This Week in Type: figures and numbers

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Blog header @ Fontfeed

Great resource about using figures and numerals. Concepts and software use explained and Fontfeed blog: http://fontfeed.com/archives/figuring-out-numerals/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fontfeed+%28The+FontFeed%29

And the corresponding sequel: http://fontfeed.com/archives/figuring-out-numerals-the-sequel/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fontfeed+%28The+FontFeed%29

Detail from Sven Neumann's study

An exemplary and inspirational empirical study on legibility. It’s written in german but Google Translate can help quite a bit. Sven’s work methodology is well presented and the findings are not surprising, but it’s well worth reading: www.typografie.info/2/content.php/250-Empirische-Studie-zur-Lesbarkeit

[update: found an english version on the OpenType forum here: http://opentype.info/blog/2011/09/20/empirical-study-about-the-legibility-of-typefaces-used-on-signs-in-public-space/]

Tundra's full charset at ILT

Must love Tundra’s character set development: http://ilovetypography.com/2011/10/05/the-making-of-ff-tundra/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ILoveTypography+%28i+love+typography%29

Felton's presentation on Vimeo

Nicholas Felton’s Numerical Narratives at Eeyo Festival 2011: http://vimeo.com/27800118. It’s not really about type and typography, but his works are just great—already on my iPhone ;)

Detail from Roboto

Roboto from Google: http://typographica.org/2011/on-typography/roboto-typeface-is-a-four-headed-frankenstein/?mid=5091. Still don’t know what to make of it… On the one hand, part of me wants to love it. On the other hand… Via Tânia Raposo @ Type Shares

This Week in Type: It’s all about vid… Vimeo!

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Dan Rhatigan's conference on Vimeo

A week after our successful Portuguese Typography conference, I’m determined to get back on this blog’s saddle. With this in mind, here’s another edition of This Week in Type—I’ll try to shorten this topic down to 5 links a week, organized on a given theme or topic. In order to get them out every week I’ll slim down the text to an almost “bookmark style” post.

First and foremost, after ATypI’s short videos on Vimeo, here’s Rhatigan’s conference on Web fonts and more: http://vimeo.com/29473760 (post image). Hope we’ll be able to publish our own conference videos soon too (Petr van Blokland’s conference rocked!)

Detail from Web Ink's website

Talking about typography on the Web, here’s Thomas Phinney’s Typography’s Best Practices for the Web. Part 1: http://blog.webink.com/web-fonts/free-best-practices-for-web-typography-webcast-series/ and Part 2: http://blog.webink.com/webink/free-webcast-best-practices-for-web-typography-part-2-setting-web-type/

Detail from Fontfeed's blog

Vocabulary of Type (via Fontfeed): http://vimeo.com/12723954. Not about web, not even a “today technology” but a nice experimental video.

rtype on vimeo

One more visual inspiration reference—Rui Abreu’s latest experiment: http://vimeo.com/12723954. Big fan of his work (but I’m a biased friend of him…)

As a final note, not a video link, but I’m sure it’ll produce a lot of videos online. The next Typo conference: http://www.fontshop.com/blog/newsletters/typolondon2011/?utm_source=Newsletter20110928&utm_medium=email&utm_term=em&utm_campaign=typolondon2011&affId=98219

Europe’s most successful annual three-day design conference comes to London: TYPO. An A-list of influential speakers from the world of typography; information, graphic and digital design; brand experience; film; animation; publishing and education are confirmed for this inaugural edition. The theme for TYPO’s London debut is “Places”. The conference will take place from 20-22 October in Logan and Jeffery Halls at the University of London.

Fontforge binaries…

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A couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with Mario Moura. We started talking about the typography class he teaches at the Editorial Design master at the Fine Arts Faculty of Porto, and soon we were talking about font developing software.

I have this conversation from time to time with different people. It’s about the strategies and tools adopted in the different design learning contexts (this topic of discussion actually started a few years ago with Mario himself).  One thing led to another, and, at a given point, he reported students were having trouble finding the necessary files to install Fontforge in the Mac OSX. They still seem to find it difficult, although George Williams has dedicated a significant amount of effort into documenting all the necessary steps. I’ve also tried to simplify it before.

Even when they can understand the necessary steps, there’s always the need to download X11, or to have XCode and the necessary libraries on the system. Other issues include the need to have MacPorts download the gigabytes of ports and dependencies needed to build Fontforge from the source files…I know from my personal experience that this can be very frustrating.

So, if you need to use it in classes, or you can’t build it on your system, here’s quick-fix solution to it (you still need to have install permissions):

  1. Download and install XQuartz, an alternative open source X window system for the Mac OSX;
  2. Download and install the necessary dependencies;
  3. Download and install the latest Fontforge release (20110222).

That’s all there is to it! Now you only have to start XQuartz, then type “fontforge” into the terminal and start editing your fonts.

I’ve pre-compiled Fontforge and almost all the dependencies on OSX 10.6. Somehow I managed to build and install libjpeg and libtiff from source. I think they’ve been included into this build, but I couldn’t create the .dmgs for them with the port command. Nevertheless, everything should be working except the EPS import. As I have only one Mac OSX system, I can’t really test if everything is working as it should, so I’m making this available “as is”…

As a final note, I urge you to check all the necessary license agreements before using these builds. Here’s Fontforge’s license:

Copyright 2000,2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006,2007,2008,2009,2010,2011 by George Williams. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR “AS IS” AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.