I made a concept of really different type design software

Dziedzic · June 23

I'm looking for few brave man or woman to play with extremely irritating app.

I made this concept app to proof myself it works or not and after few days of shouting on myself and crying discover it could be very useful (and irritating as much is different from other tools).
Brief explanation is on www.typoland.com
I have no idea what to do with this stuff and how to responsibly share.
Someone interested?
(MacOs only, better new one.)

Simon Cozens · June 23

I think there's some really, really interesting ideas in here, but I'm afraid the explanations are currently a bit too abstract to be able to evaluate them well. As a result, it just looks really complicated. I'd like to see, for each of those new features, a short explanation of (1) what problem does this solve? (2) how does the feature help me solve it? (3) what do I do as a user with the software to solve it?

The first one is headed "multiple coordinate systems" but then you don't describe these systems - instead it sounds more like you're talking about smart components. Multidimensional values: for what? Values have targets: What's a "value"? If it's what I think it is, "you can define a point's coordinates either absolutely, or relative to other coordinates in the glyph", that's very powerful. Objects can be shared: what's an "object"? Is it a component?

I think it just needs to be explained in more type-designery language.

Dave Crossland · June 23

Tantalizing stuff!

I would love to see some screen recordings (perhaps with https://github.com/ishandeveloper/Recordify) so you can show us how you use the application, as what you describe on the web page feels like small glimpses of a bigger picture.

(You could record in Polish and allow YouTube AI to transcribe and translate what you say.)

Dziedzic · June 23

Ok, try to improve it. Somehow hard — first it's a really hard to explain because it is similar to nothing I know

.

Put some screen recordings on page

Dziedzic · June 23

I updated little bit a page, and made an ”O”. It's painful, but only for first glyphs. https://typoland.com/Movies/O.mp4

Qwerasd · June 23

This software looks quite interesting! It reminds me of some ideas I've had before about making type design software that works more like the parametric design tools often seen in CAD programs, with constraints and dependencies being the main way that shapes are defined.

I think the editing modality you've come up with here has a lot of potential. However, the UI you currently have seems like it creates a lot of friction. Of course, the UX can always be improved down the line.

For inspiration, I suggest looking at parametric CAD tools (a free option is FreeCAD). Of course, I don't think your system has a constraint solver (which would be a great feature, in my opinion), but I think inspiration could be taken in terms of how to visualize the relationships between points, and perhaps some of the tools for defining them without having to manually edit nodes in a tree with a bunch of dropdown menus.

Simon Cozens · June 23

I had a similar idea a few years back, which I never really finished off: https://github.com/simoncozens/GlyphsPlugins/blob/master/Springs.README.md

Dziedzic · June 23

This ”nightmare” with windows and dropdown menus is only on the beginning and with new defined chunks. Next step is just joining segments, copy and paste objects in right place in glyph structure. I was surprised how fast I can make „&” without thinking too much about consistency. And play with width, proportions, general look. Rest was done before, with “O”, ”I”, automatically.
In other hand, it's easy to work in more traditional way: this Cruzita font was made without defining all parameters, just copy and paste elements I wanted to be consistent. In few hours.

jakeflem · July 13

Looks pretty interesting. How can we use it?

I made a concept of really different type design software

Comments

Categories