Typophile - Comments

Dear everyone, First of all,

David R — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:37:31 -0700

Dear everyone,

First of all, thank you for your fast answers. I did already have some of these, but not all; this was really helpful.

To answer Florian, I will narrow my request down: contemporary, recent works; US and Europe; anything, from outstanding to common. Any Garamond will do, apart from the crappy Monotype.

Again, thanks to everyone... Keep posting.

One thing to keep in mind is

jcrippen — Sun, 11 May 2008 14:19:05 -0700

One thing to keep in mind is that classical Mongolian descends from the Arabic abjad, but written from top to bottom instead of left to right. You’re going to have to deal with many things that cause problems in Arabic design, so if you find no explanations for classical Mongolian (not surprising, there’s not much computer support yet), look to what’s been done for Arabic.

Your requirement for split hyphenation, where a hyphen appears on both the end of one line and the beginning of another, will be a typesetting problem and not easily solvable through OpenType. I think the old German orthography problem of duplicating a letter on the following line (e.g. »Schiff-/fahrt« for »Schiffahrt«) is basically similar. Marking the start of a line or sentence is also better done in typesetting, since it will often need to be adjusted by hand. Fighting with a font’s automatic behavior is a losing battle.

Don’t let any of this dissuade you from trying to make the font work rather than going with SVG or something. You can do most of what you want in OpenType, and having done so you’ll end up with many more intellectual rewards. The result will also have a much broader potential audience.

Homeboyz by Oliver Hoffmann.

Angel71 — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:51:08 -0700

Homeboyz by Oliver Hoffmann.

It’s been a while since

Arlo Vance — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:40:56 -0700

It’s been a while since posting the first rendition. Here’s what I’ve been up to since. I’ve modified the bowls of the p,q,b,d, and alt a,g to match more harmoniously. I’ve also added a set of numbers, both lining and old style. Any more comments would be wonderful.

Design MFAs don’t really

James Puckett — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:38:33 -0700

Design MFAs don’t really make much. Go with VCU.

Urm, you need to calibrate a

Thomas Phinney — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:34:06 -0700

Urm, you need to calibrate a display even it’s from Apple, no? At least if color accuracy is important to you.

Cheers,

Count me as an RSS user who

Stephen Coles — Sun, 11 May 2008 13:27:42 -0700

Count me as an RSS user who periodically checks my tracker page to see replies for my participated threads.

Here’s a bit of irony: I think those who access via RSS might not see this poll because “Poll Content” is not part of Typophile’s main RSS feed.

I would add to the excellent

William Berkson — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:34:17 -0700

I would add to the excellent comments so far a couple of things.

First, in Tracy’s defense he does say that getting the control characters spaced right is difficult and worth taking time over. He never says that there is a mechanical rule.

Second, I would add that when you are doing your first fonts, you are likely to have to revise your initial work several times.

To get the balance right between control characters right I had to do more characters and check the affect on words, and re-adjust. In the characters that don’t echo the shapes of the control characters—s, g, t, etc., I had to redraw several times to get them to space properly. And the italic was even more difficult in terms of spacing and redrawing. Hopefully, as you gain experience there is less need to do such re-working, but expect it in your first efforts.

Finally, I note that there are different philosophies for handling the diagonal characters in digital type. It seems that some prefer to space them with negative side bearings, and kern them out more widely as needed. Others prefer to space them positively and kern them in negatively as needed.

Thanks Paul. Cartoonish is

Jennifer — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:22:16 -0700

Thanks Paul. Cartoonish is right. Plus, what a lot of work outlined in the threads. Compared to plugging in an apple display. yikes.

I brought my laptop to Future Shop yesterday and hooked it up, calibrated it as best I could, it was still over-saturated. It wasn’t an Ultra Sharp, but I don’t know about the Dell idea. Maybe you do get what you pay for, and after working on cinema displays this long, maybe I’ll always be bugged by the differences. :(

thanks everyone.

This could be interesting,

k.l. — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:22:09 -0700

This could be interesting, yet I think this is something which every type designer needs to do for himself.
For example, you might analyze typefaces by different designers or foundries in search for some common spacing laws — to find that there are none. There is nothing like good-spacing-per-se, everybody has a different approach. At least this was my conclusion so far. The differences might be minute since most people seem to start with strings like the ones sketched above, but the differences are still there. For my taste (obviously Mr Montalbano’s too), it is a frequent mistake that round letterforms get too little space and then need positive kerning. On the other hand, one could regard this as a special method. ;-) For my taste, people tend to space uppercase letters (sometimes lowercase letters too) too tight and then end up with need for an endless list of kerning pairs. &c.
I bet that such an analysis reveals more about the judge than about the analyzed typeface’s spacing/kerning.

Karsten

Museum of Modern Art (NYC)

eliason — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:02:23 -0700

Museum of Modern Art (NYC) for Franklin Gothic
Qwest for Gill Sans
University of St. Thomas for Garamond

MyFonts.com doesn’t sell

Stephen Coles — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:49:07 -0700

MyFonts.com doesn’t sell Monotype fonts so their showings for these fonts cannot be relied upon.

Magistral is a similar design which includes Cyrillic.

Stilleto does not have

SuperUltraFabulous — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:30:16 -0700

Stilleto does not have uppercase.

you are welcome :-)

SuperUltraFabulous — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:26:12 -0700

you are welcome :-)

Dav, First of all thanks and

andrei_bva — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:19:21 -0700

Dav,

First of all thanks and ... duh ... :)

I only checked myfont.com and the option for cyrillic didn’t show any glyphs so I assumed it didn’t have any.

Vlad