I'm playing with the idea of a website which extends the
Typecooker idea to different scripts. The aim is to interest people in designing for global scripts by giving them simple challenges to get them into it.
(Yes, I know that designing for unfamiliar scripts takes a lot of research and experimentation and simply copying letterforms will produce a bad result, but I trust that type designers are a dilligent lot and will go and do that research, and I also plan to give more and more links for each script to facilitate that research. Currently there's a link to Scriptsource for each script, but there's also the facility to add more.) The current state of the site is up at
http://simoncozens.github.io/scriptcooker/ - it only has a few scripts at present but it's not too hard to add full Unicode coverage.
I can manage the programming side of this but I don't have the script-specific knowledge to make the challenges reasonable. In particular, assigning difficulty levels to the scripts, and giving people a reasonable starter set of glyphs which define the characteristics of the font, similar to "adhesion" or "videospan" or whatever for Latin. If anyone could contribute any difficulty level / adhesion pairs for scripts they are familiar with, either here or as changes to the
source file, that would be very helpful!
Comments
That's for Chinese and Han glyphs in Japanese, seriously.
Here is the explaination:
東 : overall width and vertical spatial destribution
国 : maximum fill ratio
三 : the top and bottom spaces
力 : the hook shape
今 : diagonal strokes and balancing
書 : a character with many horizontal strokes
鷹 : compression of radicals in a complex character
酬 : a horizontally dense character
鬱 : balance of complex characters
愛 : shows the "tightness" of characters
袋 : rightward hook and vertical spatial destribution
永 : traditional Chinese calligraphic example, shows most strokes' shape