{"id":2000,"date":"2010-12-18T21:49:54","date_gmt":"2010-12-18T21:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2010\/12\/18\/introducing_cop\/"},"modified":"2023-07-18T14:30:59","modified_gmt":"2023-07-18T18:30:59","slug":"introducing_cop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2010\/12\/18\/introducing_cop\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Copse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/img\/Copse.jpg\" width=\"100%\" height=\"600\" alt=\"Copse\"><\/p>\n<p><strong>I performed a little experiment<\/strong> during the the first two weeks of this month, and designed a typeface called <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/webfonts\/family?family=Copse\">Copse<\/a>. The design is not very experimental, but the process was. When I realized I would need some freelance projects to tide me over until I secured a new work visa and began a new full-time job in the Spring, I was approached by Google and asked to submit some proposals for their <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/webfonts\">library of web fonts<\/a>. Since they were hoping for something ready before the end of the year, we thought I should try some display fonts with a focused concept that could be produced rapidly, and expanded later on if they proved to be popular. (That means the more you use it, the more likely you&#8217;ll get more weights and styles to use at some point.)<\/p>\n<p>Copse is a hybrid of a text face and a typewriter face, meant to hold up well if used at small sizes online, but produce a soft but clear effect at larger sizes. It has low contrast and soft edges, with some kicky ball terminals to provide a splash of color.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/webfonts\/family?family=Copse\">You can get it here<\/a> \u2014 right now, for free.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> To answer a few questions that have been trickling in, which reminded me that I forgot to mention half the things about this that I intended:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i>&#8220;Has it derived from Gina?&#8221;<\/i> Yes. Working from the outlines of a reliable design was part of the original experiment in producing this quickly. Although some glyphs have been completely altered, it&#8217;s basically Gina&#8217;s skeleton wearing different flesh \u2014 lower contrast, simplified connections, flatter serifs and terminals, slightly taller caps, different spacing. Basically, I filed down all the delicate parts and rebuilt the details.<\/li>\n<li><i>&#8220;Also on XP, without Cleartype, it looks flaky&#8230; but you probably know this&#8221;<\/i> Ugh. Tell me about it. Now I understand quite vividly why everyone who deals with webfonts is so eager  for DirectWrite to become the new standard. Hinting for Windows is really tricky, and it&#8217;s the main reason I can&#8217;t muster much enthusiasm for working with (or on) webfonts that much yet.<\/li>\n<li><i>&#8220;Is it using any Truetype hints or is it just all auto stemmed?&#8221;<\/i> It&#8217;s using TrueType hinting, but that was generated automatically. I always design with Type 1 autohinting in mind, since I know how to prepare that pretty well. Mostly, it requires consistency and keeping track of stem weights and alignments. All those values are then fed into the set-up for TrueType hinting, but I don&#8217;t yet know how to tweak the TrueType hints manually after that.<\/li>\n<li>What&#8217;s nice about webfonts is that they make it easy to push out updates and fixes. I hope I can improve some things like hinting and certain outline details eventually.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Also, In the version Google posted the other day, I noticed a glitch that I\u2019ve corrected and should be available for re-download in a day or two. Basically, if you use the downloaded font in any Adobe software and set it larger than 100 points or so, the lowercase &#8220;e&#8221; or its related accents looks like this:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Copse glitch\" src=\"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/img\/Copse_fontforge.jpg\" width=\"100%\" height=\"273\"><\/p>\n<p>[Beware \u2014 technical font nerdery happening NOW.] I drew the original glyphs as Type 1 outlines in Fontlab, and then converted these to TrueType outlines at the end. Then I opened the file in FontForge to do the TrueType autohinting, and to run a few automated tasks to reduce the number of nodes and optimize the results. The weird spur on the &#8220;e&#8221; comes from an off-curve point getting numbered as the first in the outline. Easily fixed, but it looks like Adobe&#8217;s rendering engine misinterprets that after a certain size threshold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I performed a little experiment during the the first two weeks of this month, and designed a typeface called Copse. The design is not very experimental, but the process was. When I realized I would need some freelance projects to tide me over until I secured a new work visa and began a new full-time &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2010\/12\/18\/introducing_cop\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Introducing Copse&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultratypographic"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2000"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71107,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2000\/revisions\/71107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}