Working on font posters

For the past couple months I have been working on font posters for myfonts.com.

There are two types of images that myfonts recommends to help display a typeface. One is a font flag, which originally was supposed to be 200 by 200 pixels but now, because of retina displays, should be 400 by 400 pixels. The other type is a font poster, a larger image that is twice as wide as tall. Originally they were supposed to be 720 by 360 pixels, but now the recommended size is 1440 by 720.

My toolbox for creating these images is rather limited, but I have been able to supply at least one for over 80% of my font families. One of my favorites is below, a display for an almost illegible set of typefaces called Flag Day.

A couple of new fonts

As a byproduct of designing a number of maze books, I ended up with a lot of tessellation patterns. I used them to design two packages of fonts that are now available on myfonts.com. Tescellations is a set of fonts that are composed of letter forms that tessellate.

Included in the package is one font that lets you easily make letter tessellation patterns. Simply type a bit of text with one character, such as:

AAAAA
AAAAA
AAAAA

then format it with TescellationsPatterns and make sure that the font size and line spacing are set to the same value.

Why stop at letter tessellations? TessieDingie contains two typefaces that allow one to make tessellation patterns. One contains abstract shapes and the other contains shapes that resemble birds, insects, tools, vehicles, and other objects from everyday life.

For more information, follow the links and check them out at myfonts.com.

Auldroon

Searching through maze books on Amazon, I found Auldroon in use.

Ogonek

This past summer I spent a week in Glenwood Springs, Colorado and, while there, walked around Saint Stephen Catholic Church. The church has a statue of Pope John Paul II with inscriptions on the base in English, Spanish, and Polish.

At the time I had spent many hours adding Central European diacritics to my typefaces, so I was startled to see the E ogonek on the inscription.

Does it jump out at you that the ongonek is backward? The hook should point to the right, not the left.

In addition, the slashed L is not correctly drawn--the slash is far too low. It should be about halfway up the stem.

I did not get all my Polish letters correct according to the instructions that are here. I tried to make them look aesthetically pleasing and sometimes I violated the rules. However, I do not think I ever had the ogonek backward.

A Kerning game

Here.

I scored 91, but do not know if that is good or bad.

Update: And also a shape game, where you play with control points.

I am very impressed with the programming that must have gone into this. It is way beyond what I was capable of.

Fontographer 5.1

A bug fix for Fontographer 5 has been released. I look forward to giving it a spin and see if they have fixed the problems I found in the program.

The benefit of dropping out

On February 8 The Wall Street Journal had a quote from Steve Jobs about his decision to drop out of college. (Entire quote is open only to subscribers.) Speaking at the commencement at Stanford in 2005, he described how after dropping out, he stayed at Reed and sat in classes that he thought were interesting. One class that fascinated him was a class on calligraphy, and his interest in calligraphy came from the beautiful lettering he saw around the campus. In the course he learned about typography. The result of that course was that when the Macintosh was being developed, he insisted that it include beautiful typography, with a selection of fixed-space and proportional fonts. Windows, which he said was just a copy of the Macintosh interface, followed the lead. He implied that without that course, computers might still be using typewriter fonts for display. I suspect that they would not, but the move to decent typography on the computer would have come much later. Certainly, without the Macintosh, the user interface that we have would be far more primative.

I never realized how much I owed to Steve Job's decision to drop out of school and pursue and education rather than a degree. My interest in typography developed from using a desktop publishing program called Ventura Publisher on the PC and then a year or two year later, Pagemake on the Macintosh. On the Macintosh I discovered a primitive but effective program that allowed one to construct bitmapped fonts. I did a couple, and then found Fontographer. I bought it, and it was one of the very few programs that I purchased back then. The first font I produced with Fontographer was Zirkle.