Streamlining Dafont Creation?
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The user and all related content has been deleted.1
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The examples they show are crude, but so were the examples that were given in the documentation of Fontographer 1.0.
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.3 -
I'm generally skeptical of parametric type design.
That's a good way of looking at it.It seems too reductionist, too limiting.
Yes, absolutely, among other descriptions.But I wouldn't categorically write it off either.
Ah! Now you have a better way of looking at it. I watched their video and read the descriptions, and it's just possible these guys are on the right track; only time will tell. They aren't quite there with what I think the potential is for their software, but I believe they have the right idea compared to others I have seen.
With those thoughts in mind, for the first time ever I donated to their Kickstarter project. I wish them the best.1 -
James: I think scanners have already done to type design what sampling did to music. This looks more analogous to a synthesizer. Techno fonts anybody?1
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If nothing else, it has the potential to be a good teaching tool. When we launched FontStruct we knew no one would drop FOG/FL and make FS their new pro editor. It was meant to be an accessible way to learn some fontmaking basics, and more importantly, to learn where modular and parametric design works and where it doesn’t. It’s been used in schools to demonstrate those things and this: how quickly you can make an alphabet and a font, and how difficult it is to make a good one. Most folks who try FontStruct gain a new appreciation for proper type design, and I think the same could be true for Prototypo.0
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On the other hand, maybe they aren’t exactly being realistic about parametric design’s limitations…
“What if creating a font perfectly fit for your website was easier than browsing through a webfont library?”
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I agree with the theoretical potential of parametric design, but... "to learn where modular and parametric design works and where it doesn’t," requires a starting point the works, and what I see in their demos doesn't. Shapes and spaces are hideously amateur in appearance and I don't think throwing money at that kind of problem is likely to improve it.3
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There've been some really nice new tools lately for making fonts, and what makes them so good is that they were designed by type designers.
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.1 -
Both Prototypo and Metapolator teams are very open to collaboration.
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.php0 -
Prototypo applies Mustache-style HTML templating to SVG Fonts. Its brilliantly executed and I agree with Stephen Coles that it has enourmous didactic potential.
Metapolator is 'Metafont on Rails,' enabling type designers to design metafonts without coding anything, instead just following some simple drawing conventions.This looks more analogous to a synthesizer
That's what the Metapolator project has been looking to
I wonder if it would help if they were working with an experienced type designer.
Metapolator is working with several 0 -
David, isn’t the money raised intended to address the problem of the amateurish-looking starting points of characters such as “a”? —
“…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.0 -
"it has enourmous didactic potential."
But how many didacs are still out there to appreciate it?0 -
Frode, didn't you mean to type "binness? ;-P1
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It's undeniably cool and fresh, though on the surface it appears to put font making into an art-free zone. However, that's not to say someone who's able to put some art into it might not be able to squeeze some art out of it. The thinking is along the right lines (which is to say simple), especially if Prototypo and Metapolator are able to turn marks and other OT features into background functions, obviating the need for much of the nerd layer.
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?
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Sometimes you have to step in a puddle to know how it feels to get your feet wet.0
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... and then sometimes you have to dam it all to get your feet clean again.
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...
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I think this is a cris-de-coeur from people looking at font development and seeing a really lousy and confused set of tools that are cobbled together in ways that would be completely unacceptable in, say, document makeup applications. At least I hope that's what it is. It could be the start of something new and eventually valuable, or it could be another dead end that benefits a little and suffers a lot from being open source.0
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A problem I see with parametric tools like this is that it all hinges on the particular font model employed. You're limited to creating only fonts that are based on that particular model. If you look at fonts in the real world, very few share a common model. And the models, in most cases, are usually way more complex.
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.1 -
Not just interpolation of intermediates, actually: the deal we want, or I do, is to define the poles parametrically as well.
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.
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David, sorry for not being clearer. I was referring to print tools of the InDesign variety, not web tools, about which I agree with you completely. I still live largely in the antique world of print.0
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Did you see/try Fontark.net?
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.-1 -
I don’t see how this differs from interpolation, which we have adjusted to for generating weights etc. (sometimes requiring extra fixed defaults along an axis).
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.
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What you are talking about Nick, is meta-family. The type designer can draw the glyph-part shapes at the poles of the axes, a serif pole, a stroke pole, a stress pole, roughness, irregularity, and etc. one family and one pole at a time.
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.;)0 -
I think that parameterized type design as presented in Prototypo and Metapolator is an interesting development and that these tools provide at least a valuable preview of what will be possible in the (near) future. One can emphasize the shortcomings in the programs and underline the superiority of the type designer’s eye and intuition, but at the same time one should acknowledge their increasing versatility. Also I believe that by mapping the underlying harmonic and rhythmic aspects of type more insight in what exactly comprises the creative process in type design and what are its constraints, can be gained.
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.
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Related:
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That drawing method looks interesting! It might be particularly useful for making thin sanses with subtle stroke modulation. The outside curves look a bit bumpy to me in places, though; I'm wondering whether that's an inherent difficulty of this method.0
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I don't know Robofab but in Fontark you draw the Skeleton (center line) and the outline is generated for you in any desired width, than in the Outline layer you can give any desired detail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYMyuffi1O0#t=61
Creating a complete BL set skeletons takes about 30 min (including punctuation) and you get all your characters in sync0 -
"Related:"
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.
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Is this related?
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After realizing that even long adverts were not enough, the DTL tribe desperately started looking for other ways to impress the Berlowian Oracle.
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