Ultrasparky

I know that Dave from Helveti.ca is finishing up his first book design project over here, so I am shamelessly scooping, and shamelessly stealing these pictures of awesome typofabrics from India, Ink.

Even though I can barely sew on a button I’ve been fantasizing what I could do if I bought up every stitch of it that this eBay seller could get her hands on, especially once I discovered that she has other kinds as well:

Friends, students, admirers, and mockers already know of my vast collection of type-themed t-shirts, but now I’m imagining myself wearing a full suit made out of type cloth. Perhaps all Helvetica, with a nice shirt made out of the serify stuff, and a tie and pocket square made from the numbers? Or at least some sheets and pillowcases. What with the tattoos, the t-shirts, and flights of fancy like this, I realize that I’m on the verge of becoming a Batman villain, albeit one with much more style than this loser. Still, if anyone can make this happen I will be your slave for life.

Of course, I’d much rather have a Cooper Black leather jacket. (Thank you folks, I’ll be here all week.)

Now that we’ve started drawing and sketching for our practical work, I’ve been spending more and more time thinking about the kinds of forms that might work well for the problems I’ve been talking about so far. In many ways, it’s a very open-ended question: it’s not a unique problem to want clarity and legibility in type for dense text situations that may not be produced well. For the kind of technical publications I’m targeting, a certain kind of “classical” or “traditional” feeling would probably be received well, but I’m determined to sneak in as many technical adaptations (addressing issues of reproduction quality, optical sizes ranging from titles down to elaborate superiors and inferiors, legibility of individual letters as well as words) as I can.

Continue reading “You Can Judge a Book by Its Counters”

In Counterpunch, Fred Smeijers talks about the importance of word shapes in how we read:

At the root of configuration or overall visual arrangement is the design of the word. . . . Though it might seem that the type designer’s aim is to make new characters, the real goal is to create a new word-image. [ch. 4, p. 29]

Good type leads to good word shapes which leads to good comprehension. Makes sense, right? It’s a concept I’ve read about elsewhere, but as I try to develop a brief for this whole math type issue, it leads to some additional questions. Namely, how do we read word shapes in math? As I’ve mentioned before, equations don’t really work as words quite the same way, and comprehension is a little harder since you can’t easily rely on context to clarify individual characters. Equations have basic rules for structure and notation, though, so there are conventions that aid comprehension in that context. So what kinds of patterns emerge form those rules? What are the functional “word shapes” that make math notation comprehensible? And — most importantly — how can type be optimized to make those mathematical word shapes easy to read?

Spacing in math is, in general, much looser than in text since it’s often a collection of symbols and operators. In a way, each symbol is a noun and each operator is a verb. Rows of symbols are usually shorthand for values multiplied by one another, and looser spacing helps clarify their separation from one another. You may find actual words like “sin” (sine) or “cos” (cosine) scattered within, set in roman rather than italic. These words ought to be spaced normally. You also have changes in vertical positioning all the time — superiors, inferiors, division, limits, matrices, etc. Readability, then, has to factor in the different meanings of space, different meanings of style, and different reading directions. This is pretty different from anticipating word shapes that move in one direction along one line.

Smeijers, Fred, Counterpunch: making type in the sixteenth century; designing typefaces now. London, Hyphen Press, 1996

And a few other ideas to file away for the practical work:

• • The STIX folks have been keeping up with developments to Unicode, and are maintaining tables of recommended Type 1 character names. Look into that.
  • Structured documents can have a tough time dealing with the level of granularity that might be required for complex font changes, unlike TeX documents that seem to thrive on it. What can be done to anticipate fitting and usage problems in when it’s not easy to change back and forth between fonts? For instance, can OpenType contextual alternates be used to insert terms like “sine” and “cosine” that wouldn’t be set italic like other characters in math?

In addition to standard text and numerical glyphs, a good family for dealing with math would need a pretty robust set of agate glyphs for superiors, inferiors, dense tables, etc.

• Also, spacing would have to be very different for characters that get used for equations, so a different font that spaces the glyphs differently may be needed: probably not monospaced, but certainly set wider, and with no italics that kern or overset their bounding boxes.
• Should the type be optimized for screen display, publication, or some happy medium?
• Italics should be fairly upright, but definitely italic in style rather than staying too close in form to the roman. They will need to be very distinct from one another.
• Not too much contrast, or any details that are too delicate. However, not too blocky and informal, either.
• The equation might may also benefit from having short ascenders and descenders to minimize trouble with spacing of overbars, stacked combining symbols, and divisions.

Mitja’s “Reflection on Practice” essay talks about some good qualities that would be relevant to what I’d like to do, especially the notion of case-sensitive punctuation and operators.

An article by Donald Knuth and Hermann Zapf about the development of their Euler fonts for typesetting math gives me a lot to chew on. More than I can lucidly process right now, so instead let me jot down a few notes to file away for further thought or inquiry:

• Knuth mentions a lot of qualities that mathematicians expect to see that are based on blackboard-writing conventions. Are those still relevant at this point, or is more teaching and research with math being done with electronic tools. If so, how do those tools present the math?
• Optimization for screen display could be a big factor with the practical work.
• Track down the digital Euler fonts themselves. The AMS only offers a few of the fonts as part of their TeX resources, and Linotype seems to have the full set, but only as part of a fairly pricey collection of Zapf’s work on CD.
• What other math development projects have there been? Something must be happening with the STIX fonts, right? What kind of research went into Microsoft’s Cambria Math? What about Lucida Pro’s math? What other major efforts were there before the Euler project?
• Maybe a general idea for the dissertation could be an investigation of the various efforts that have been made to address the type-for-math problem. Every time I read about one, it seems to have been formed out of nothingness, without much inquiry into what’s come before. that’s probably not the case, but it could help to dig up antecedents and follow them through to more contemporary efforts.
• Knuth and Zapf talk a lot about the scripts and frakturs and such, not just the romans, italic, and Greek. Look for more examples of all of those.

Knuth, Donald E., and Zapf, Hermann, “AMS Euler — A New Typeface for Mathematics” Scholarly Publishing, April 1989, pp 131–157

It’s interesting to read “Future Tendencies in Type Design” in 2006, 20 years after Hermann Zapf first wrote this article about whether or not there is any point in updating classic typefaces for yet another new type technology. (Short version: He says “no.”)

I tend to agree with him, for many of the reasons he cites. Typefaces are very much products of their own era and its technologies, and attempts to carry them over into other contexts lose a fair amount of the spirit inherent in the source. At the same time, it’s not as if the basic designs of type should be laid to rest just because new technologies call for adaptation. Instead, it would be wiser to openly acknowledge the source and inspiration, but solve the problems of the new context from scratch without holding too slavishly to the model.

Of course, any revival of an old typeface is forced to do this to some degree or another. The problem, though — one which Zapf (and plenty of other people I’ve heard/read) feels has mostly been handled badly — is one of typefaces getting badly updated without enough regard to the past to accurately match them, or enough thought about the future to adequately evolve them in to something else.

It strikes me as a very Modernist stance to take: form follows function, so if the function (or manufacture or reproduction methods) changes, then the forms should adapt accordingly in order to give the best result. Zapf has seen his own work designed for metal go through some poor adaptions from film to digital, and wishes that market forces would have made it easier to create new versions altogether rather than corrupt the original ideas and slap the same names onto them.

The interesting questions come from the time this article was written, when digitization of type was really in its infancy. From the vantage point of a couple of decades later when we have more sophisticated type technology and more processing power and storage capacity for handling digital type, we’re probably in much better shape to produce more faithful historical revivals. However, whether or not to do so is a big decision. Some foundries, thankfully, are coming out with newer, more sophisticated versions of their initial adapations of older fonts (Adobe Garamond Premier Pro, Linotype Sabon Next, Monotype Bembo Book), but they still involve compromise. At the same time, there seem to be more and more families like Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Mercury, which may start from some historical models but really blossom once they are adapted for contemporary usage problems and take full advantage of contemporary production technology.

Zapf’s essay is followed in the same volume of Visible Language by an essay from Matthew Carter, in which he describes his historical references and the extent to which he followed or departed form them in his design for ITC Galliard. Carter based Galliard very directly on the work of Robert Granjon in the 16th Century, but describes in some depth how his own design for a contemporary typeface required many adjustments for technical reasons, market demands, and & perhaps most importantly & to preserve the actual spirit of the source material. To get something to work in film and eventually digital setting, a slavish recreation was less useful than an informed, sensitive tribute.

Zapf, Hermann, “Future tendencies in type design: the scientific approach to letterforms.” Visible Language, vol XIX, no 1, 1985, pp 23–33

Carter, Matthew, “Galliard: a modern revival of the types of Robert Granjon.” Visible Language, vol XIX, no 1, 1985, pp 77–97