Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- All Categories
- 39 Introductions
- 3.6K Typeface Design
- 764 Font Technology
- 1K Technique and Theory
- 587 Type Business
- 435 Type Design Critiques
- 526 Type Design Software
- 30 Punchcutting
- 132 Lettering and Calligraphy
- 79 Technique and Theory
- 53 Lettering Critiques
- 461 Typography
- 289 History of Typography
- 111 Education
- 61 Resources
- 479 Announcements
- 74 Events
- 104 Job Postings
- 147 Type Releases
- 153 Miscellaneous News
- 259 About TypeDrawers
- 52 TypeDrawers Announcements
- 109 Suggestions and Bug Reports
Options
Comments
I'm generally skeptical of parametric type design. It seems too reductionist, too limiting. But I wouldn't categorically write it off either.
If nothing else, it might be useful for trying out ideas very quickly. In the hands of a skilled type designer, we might be surprised by what could be done with it.
I would suspect, though, that even "good" fonts created with such a tool might have a certain sameness to them.
With those thoughts in mind, for the first time ever I donated to their Kickstarter project. I wish them the best.
You can tell these guys know a lot more about programming than making fonts. I wonder if it would help if they were working with an experienced type designer.
If you want to help them, beside donating money, you can also discuss concepts and ideas at their github repos. Both are very active.
https://github.com/byte-foundry/prototypo/issues
https://github.com/metapolator/metapolator/issues
Or meet them in person. Both will be at the upcoming Nancy conference (may 6–7)
http://automatic-type-design.anrt-nancy.fr/index_en.php
Metapolator is 'Metafont on Rails,' enabling type designers to design metafonts without coding anything, instead just following some simple drawing conventions. That's what the Metapolator project has been looking to
“…manual modification of glyph outline…”
Hopefully this means that the user will be able to modify the default shapes sufficiently that they conform to professional standards.
But how many didacs are still out there to appreciate it?
It's my feeling that education is the worst place for such a tool, as it is too easily operated by people who have no discipline or judgment. Yet, if it incorporates more traditional editing tools as well as the automated ones, why not?
As for its didactic potential, I completely disagree. Instruction in type design is a subtly screwed "art." Success is found in the design of letters for the resulting typography. Most modern tools are designed to deal with the shit storm a font must be in the interest of increasingly complex typography.
The narrative of this tool, on the other paw, is "design all the letters at once." I.E. the typography already exists, now fix it. So, be my guest and draw a line between poor masters and their already poor typography, and learning to design fonts. And then try to put money anywhere you want along that line to make it educative and entertaining, without being aesthetically in line with everyday type, as it appears. I dunno...
As type designers, we create the model in our heads as we create a typeface. It goes hand in hand, and the model changes as the typeface design evolves. It's difficult to imagine a parametric type design tool that could capture the richness and subtly of such models, or if they could even be encoded. I'm not sure most type designers could fully describe the models they employ. So much is based on observation and intuition, things that are difficult to quantify or measure.
Not that such a tool might not be useful, but I think it would be easy for novices to get the impression that type design can be reduced to tweaking a few sliders.
Agreeing totally with Mark, somewhat obliquely, is that the meta-fontfamily is all most type designers want, but meta-fontclass sort of comes with that. Meta-fontishness needs a kind of perfection that, if even ever attained, is so far from user environments that the fonts it must produce in the end will require a lot more than these guys, or any of meta-font's offspring have, and so far, we're just talking Latin...
And Scott, document makeup applications are a really lousy and confused set of tools cobbled together in ways that are completely unacceptable to many typographers, with the W3C leading the way... that, and the fact that fonts are bamboozling to most folks as a way to store typography, is how font tools got this way.
Fontark represent a different approach to the same issue...
Fontark's first and leading concept is "Never limit the designer". This concept led to a very flexible platform where the designer can create any desired connectivity between the font glyphs and have full control over any aspect of the design.
Fontark's meta font is a Skeleton. - A Skeleton is a line, which is much easier to control than an outline and much faster to draw... and "code", without coding at all. "Skeleton based" type design is not very fond over type designers, for understood reasons, but we see it as the basis for a much complex and flexible control over a non-consistent outline in the near future.
From my experience with it it's gives a completely new type design experience, controlling and operating it (once the basic principles has understood) is so fast and smooth it put's aside so much of the technical aspect of drawing the font and confronts you right away with the core of the design itself.
As long as the type designer can draw the glyph-part shapes at the poles of the axes, what is the problem? A serif is a serif, stroke thickness is stroke thickness, stress angle is stress angle, and so on. These are generic qualities, not aesthetic drawing judgements. One could even invent new axis categories, such as roughness or irregularity, to throw into the mix.
If "this" is being metafont, what they are showing is all of the styles you've ever drawn in one master waiting for you to correct, cooperate, fund, etc, the thousands of glyphs and millions of poles, should it succeed as the Twitter of font making.
Then what I am talking about is something in between, that's able make more typographically centered than fontographically centered fonts, for the more rather than less graphemaniacally deabstractionalistic of us.;)
I can’t resist briefly mentioning the development of the chess-playing computer here. In the chapter ‘Computer developing a human game’ of his book How life imitates chess, former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparow describes his first encounters with these machines in the 1980s. At that time he underestimated the potential of the chess computers because in 1985 he made a 100 percent score against 32 different top models. Kasparow writes about the ‘doomsday scenarios about people losing interest in chess with the rise of the machines’, but comes to the conclusion that the gloomy predictions didn’t became reality. He notes that the ‘heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the material, analyses a few billion positions, and counts up again. It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine […].’*
Actually I believe that if something can be defined, it can be programmed. Also in type design. And I believe that if something can’t be defined, it doesn’t exist. That is a highly controversial statement, I know.
When it comes to education, I think that the value of tools like Prototypo and Metapolator is purely relative to the quality of the educators. In incapable hands every tool is a disaster. The only critical comment I can make, is that the applied parameterization is from the outside, i.e., not organic. Based on my research I’m developing LeMo, which I believe is more organic, i.e., it applies parameterization from the inside.
As an exponent of his pen-oriented school, I started lecturing in line with Noordzij’s theories when I succeeded him at the KABK in 1987. After canonizing Noordzij’s doctrine for a number of years I began to realize that making the step from writing to drawing letters was quite complex for the students. One does not necessarily need to handle a pen or brush to study and apply the effects of such a tool IMHO (it can help to literally refine one’s hand, though). For this reason I developed in the course of time LeMo as (geometric) representative of a formalized Humanistic minuscule. My students use this model for exploring the construction of the supported letters, for creating their own writing examples instead of copying my hand (see above), and for experimenting with the basics of typography. Therefore the emphasis is less on controlling pen and brush, and more on the research into the basic patterns of writing, and subsequently on these in typography, as it is a related medium.
Fernando Mello is a former Plantin-Society student of mine (2012–2013 EcTd course) and he is one of the exhibitors at the Inside/Outside expo, which opens on 17 May 2014 at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp. He used LeMo as basis for a new typeface that will be published by Fontsmith Ltd in London.
On one of his exhibition panels Fernando writes: ‘The DTL LetterModeller was the real beginning of my practical design during the course, as I have defined main proportions (also the basic spacing) by going to LeMo, taking the 'Renaissance' preset with visible serifs as a starting point, and adjusting proportions and dimensions from there. After that a basic schematic font was exported from LeMo, and then imported into Fontlab. Modifications in spacing and general dimensions of the font were made as long as the design progressed, but the core essence of the dimentions and the broadnibbed pen scheme generated through LeMo stayed through the whole design process like a skeleton.’
* Garry Kasparow, How life imitates chesss (London, 2008) p.134.
Creating a complete BL set skeletons takes about 30 min (including punctuation) and you get all your characters in sync
Not really. The topic is parametric design and control, not what can one do per glyph if one has a spine. Likewise, Frank's long advert is quite far off as well. One is not getting close on this kind of thing until ones tools are putting ones eyes on the typography, and not the fonts or glyphs.