"Hardware" for typographers

[Member dbe…]

"Fixed french curves impose way too much of their own will on a drawing"

I think it depends on the user. And one French curve is hardly the whole tool kit for curves.

Have you made lots of drawings of lots of glyphs of lots of fonts using French curves than?

[Member enn…]

Subversive chiro-apologism? Psychological lethargy?

Hrant, If you read my posts carefully, and with a hermeneutical ethic of generosity rather than pre-judice or suspicion, you would know I am an energetic apologist for constructive feature manipulation and untrammled exploratory norm-violation, with the internal, optical consolidation and ‘divergification’ of the bouma or word-form for visual processing as the principal goal, when it comes to text type. In our digital environment such feature manipulation is spline- or bezier-o-centric, which is what Bloemsma worked with.

Where I said “the tension caused by Bloemsma’s rotation seems to make the white of the word more active or salient vis a vis the black,” I could have said “the tension caused by Bloemsma’s deliberate de-coupling of inner and outer contours — your “breaking of the black” — seems to make the white of the word more active or salient vis a vis the black.” In his own write-up Bloemsma talks of the “outer and inner forms behaving relatively independently.” The idea that skewing or shearing and rotating were involve at the bezier level comes from Jan Middendorp’s graphic in the "What makes Legato so Unique" forum: https://typography.guru/forums/topic/65783-forwarding#comment-334509, and the discussion that followed Middendorp’s 12 Mar 2009 — 11:31am post. I think the graphic comes from Bloemsma himself.

Is your analysis of the functional effect fundamentally at odds with my analysis relating to notan and readability?

[Member dbe…]

"After a while, I became familiar with which parts of which French Curve template (and different oval templates and straight edge) would match my pencil lines. It was very much an “assembly” job piecing together composite lines, but worked fine..."

And then the next font is a different subset... And forever. And... if something didn't fit, no one was forced to use a curve that didn't work. Like alwayz, i think the tool only influences those who want to be influenced.

The cool thing, and I wish for this there was an echo in here, is when one is choosing the set of tools to use, to make a set of tools, that make sets of tools...

[Member 5st…]

Thanks Karl!

n.

[Member hra…]

When you shear the internal organs of a person, he dies.

Enough celebrating the dead king.

i think the tool only influences those who want to be influenced.

If humans weren't concerned with efficiency/closure. The desire/need to finish something in a reasonable amount of time is what makes tools relevant. The particular convenience of the broad-bin pen, French curve, bézier*, copy-paste or coarse grid** creeps in to our work because there are limits to how much we want to fight their limits.

* Many people have pointed out that béziers makes their fonts end up looking a certain way.

** Consider what the 1000-unit Em has done to Italics.

choosing the set of tools to use, to make a set of tools, that make ....

Which is where generative fonts come in. Another promising next frontier.

hhp

[Member Joh…]

Hrant, it doesn't seem either impossible or unlikely that Evert might have produced, in the process of creating Legato, first some outlines that corresponded to more 'normal' modulation patterns and then edited these using a variety of techniques to produce the inner and outer relationships that he sought. I don't think such impurity of process implies anything about the idea or the results of the design, but simply seems efficient. It is much easier to shape something in front of you into what you want than to try to create what you want ex nihilo, on a blank piece of paper, relying only on the idea in your head. There's never been a craftsman in history who didn't appreciate a procedural shortcut invisible in the finished result.

[Member hra…]

I do have to agree with all of that.

And Evert did leave us plenty of room to improve.

hhp

[Member enn…]

“When you shear the internal organs of a person, he dies.”

So Legato is lifeless? Or does it just mean Legato is post-chiro-referential, and my analysis show to what degree and what effect? It is doubly so, systematically across the letter set, and to beneficial effect, as most of us agree. There is no dead King, because the precedent of tool-based writing is originary, but not dictatorial. The proud handmaiden or humble butler of analysis that writing-derived heuristic-templates provide is not dead.

You may not want to talk about this more, but dismissive gestures are no substitute for argument. I am however satisfied with having providing a bit of push-back. Your truism about notan could use some of that as well, as John's engagment on that score suggests. Despite my caveats, I think calling the attention of type designers to notan and to the importance of not being beholden to the pen-based coupling of inner and outer contours is absolutely apt, timely and laudable.

“The particular convenience of the broad-bin pen, French curve, bézier, copy-paste or coarse grid creeps in to our work because there are limits to how much we want to fight their limits.”

And, besides being virtually intracable — to the point of causing the design equivalent of writer’s block (and so inconvenient as a practical technique) —, liminography, from scratch, without successfully functional conventional para-paraphrastic or just paraphrastic (chiro-referential) forms as reference points, isn't limited?

At some point — even, or especially in a from-scratch process — the designer has to get a handle on or structural understanding of the formal characteristics or logic of his or her positive and negative shapes, if he or she is going to exploit the products of his or her liminographic explorations intelligently and productively and make them into an internally cohesive font that promotes internally cohesive boumas.

[Member sen…]

My head is confused with all these concepts! Ehehehe. We should have an IRC channel to discuss... stuff

[Member hra…]

Liminography is not limited because there is no essential difference between liminography are the creation of notan. In contrast with chirography, which only exists for circumstantial reasons.

The Achilles Heel of Noordzij (and his disciples) has always been the confounding of something a creator enjoys with things that users need. It is too close to Art at the expense of Design.

hhp

[Member enn…]

Notan exists whenever a mark with more than one dimension is made. Liminography is limited on account of this. The key is the distribution, and in type, the equipotency and resolvability into tractable positive and negative shapes (strokes or ‘role-units’ like bowls and stems, counters) of the light and dark. Liminography adjusts the light / dark distribution and manipulates the tractability of both the black shapes and the whites, but doesn’t create notan. We ‘read,’ in the sense of ‘perceptually process,’ the shapes but not the distribution. Visual or optical equi-potency in the distribution guarantees that both the white and the black have a proper salience and a proportionate cue-value for efficient visual processing within the framework of the word-gestalt. This is what, in my analysis, the user needs.

The written forms that have been effectively built upon para-paraphrastically in the typographical era do not persist in their typographic progeny because of authorial preference or narcissistic indifference, but because they proved to be fit for reading as a visual task. The contrast and construction options they engendered facilitated the psycho-physical unitization of the word-object, a language-appropriate level of bouma-divergance, and guaranteed the automaticity of rapid and effortless visual word-form resolution for skilled, non-dyslexic readers, That is, what the visual cortex of the end-user needs for rapid automatic visual word-form resolution —aka word recognition — has always been the principal countervailing pressure or hidden hand in the determination of what scriptorial conventions survived.

Every part of the reading / writing matrix is thoroughly circumstantial or conditioned by circumstance, including the evolved structure and plasticity of the brain, right down to the very first layers of the visual cortex and structure of the retina. The reading-ware of the brain both adjust to and disciplines the products of the writing hand and the typographic multiversity that flowed from the first retranscriptions of it in type.

[Member hra…]

they proved to be fit for reading

No, only merely adequate. Just like walking barefoot was before the invention of shoes.

This mere adequacy neither fully explains nor in any way justifies chirography's dominance.

And such denialism is exactly what I mean when I say that chirography gets more credit than it deserves.

hhp

[Member enn…]

No, genuinely fit. We disagree.

Good affordance for reading is a wide plateau, but optimality within the fluent range explored by Bigelow and Legge recently, can perhaps be incrementally fine-tuned with inventive, neuro-mechanically and perceptual psychophysically aware, strategic feature-manipulation.

I do not advocate chirography. Denialism of the prospects for building exceptionally fit alternative forms on an intrinsically convention-breaking premis has nothing to do with it. I sometimes think your anti-chirographic stance is oedipal. I think your strongly polarizing stance is more ideological, divisive and non-inclusive than conceptually obvious, sufficiently experientially grounded and motivated or tested in practice.

I am interested in what happens to contrast and construction historically and the beneficial purpose manipulating these serve in human factors terms. The construction and contrast styling templates circumstantially produced by writing give me an priviledged window into plotting and getting an accurate handle on what happens to contrast and construction historically. The beneficial purpose manipulating these serve in human factors terms is the reason for my immersion in the science of reading.

[Member Joh…]

Evolutionarily, fit and adequate are synonymous. Whatever else you think new approaches to type design might provide in terms of improvements, Hrant, you can't define these in terms of what readers need, because if they were needed they would have evolved already or reading would have failed.

[Member dbe…]

Hrant:
"Many people have pointed out that béziers makes their fonts end up looking a certain way."

Compared to... (their fonts in stone, maybe? and what if the rest of the "people" ask what you are talking about?)

And:

"Consider what the 1000-unit Em has done to Italics."

Raster image processing makes diagonals (and curves), of all kinds, not to mention fonts, end up looking, (each) a certain way.

You didn't "hear" the last part of my post.

We make tools... the tools we make have limits, but those limits pale before those of our users, who mostly would laugh at the issues you list as making anything look a certain way, or doing anything to italics.

"My head is confused with all these concepts!"

Go to your font menu and cleanse your mind, odds are, none of these peoples' work'll get in the way. ;)

[Member hra…]

Peter, I'm not interested in grazing on a plateau.

Yes, I'm being ideological. That's the only way to progress. I'm not running a school for mass-producing chiro-zombies, god save their cultural futures.

if they were needed they would have evolved already or reading would have failed.

Even if one believes that anything that's needed eventually gets invented (which I'm not sure I do) it remains that time has not yet finished.

their fonts in stone, maybe?

Sure, for example. Every visible mark requires tools (that affects the result). But I'm certainly not saying that the chisel & mallet for example is superior to the bézier - just that they're different. I love béziers.

what if the rest of the "people" ask what you are talking about?

I thought you're already doing that.

OK, let me try this:
- Do you agree that many (even most) people believe in low vertex counts?
- Do you agree that people like to save time?

those limits pale before those of our users

Sadly I think that's almost 100% true. Almost. It's that tiny remaining glimmer that somehow drives us. Very little of type design makes sense devoid of the reasons type designers greatly exaggerate -or simply invent- to keep doing what they like. The consolation is that nothing anybody ever does is only about money.

odds are, none of these peoples' work'll get in the way.

Dunno, I think Constantia has a pretty big installed-base. :-)
Me, I rely on my ambitions as a svengali.

hhp

[Member hra…]

Ancient Greek lapidary inscriptions were more angular than those of Ancient Rome largely because the Greeks carved more text (and maybe because they were culturally more pragmatic = wanted to save more time) and the tool & medium manifested itself more.

hhp

[Member Chr…]

“…constructive feature manipulation and untrammled exploratory norm-violation, with the internal, optical consolidation and ‘divergification’ of the bouma or word-form for visual processing as the principal goal, when it comes to text type.”

Translation please?

[Member enn…]

“constructive feature manipulation” is manipulation of things like contrast, construction, boldness, proportion that promotes readability, or what the visual cortex needs for effortless immersive reading.

“exploratory norm violation” is any break with existing norms or conventions in the realms of contrast styling and construction, or co-ordinating inner and outer contours.

”internal optical consolidation” is making the positive and negative shapes in the word fit or work together so the word doesn’t fall apart optically.

"divergification of the bouma” is making the complexes of positive and negative shapes that form the word and word stems or morphemes distinct enough optically so we can easily tell them apart and don’t readily confuse orthographic neighbours with eachother.

[Member dbe…]

Hrant: "Ancient Greek lapidary inscriptions were more angular than those of Ancient Rome largely because the Greeks carved more text (and maybe because they were culturally more pragmatic = wanted to save more time) and the tool & medium manifested itself more.."

You are saying you know what people dead 30 centuries wanted, saw, knew about words and their relation to the tools... good luck with that. My general impression, is that we have the Greeks to thank for introducing us to the idea that we don't always have to be in a hurry, and the Romans refined this to allow for some to hardly ever be in a hurry, which led to you, the crown of unhurried creation.

[Member hra…]

I read it somewhere (maybe Catich) and it made sense.

BTW I'm always in a hurry (having four kids between 2 and 12). Haven't you noticed how my posts have been getting shorter and shorter over the years? :-)

hhp

[Member enn…]

“I'm not interested in grazing on a plateau.”

Listen, Hrant: I admire your tenacity and appreciate your restlessness. I think most of us are with you here. But breaking the black is a crap shoot, unless it’s done systematically in followable and well-considered / well-motivated ways. And liminography is even more of a crap shoot, unless the critical opening drag-line paraphrases something you’ve assimilated — perhaps with modifications — from past designs. Progressive evolution is descent with modifications. The farther you go back into typographical lines of descent, the closer you get to actual successful species of writing, so a Noordzij style analysis of form is actually very relevant, and your opening move already evokes writing. I'm assuming your opening drag-line (the opening line a spider puts down) is not a context-less ‘random-walk’ line. Nothing that we’ve seen from you so far shows me that your method brings you any closer than Dwiggins or Bloemsma, or Matthew Carter, or David Berlow, or Lucas de Groot, or Peter Verheul, or Gerard Unger to the optimal zone on the plateau that Matthew Luckiesh’s research and hints from ‘noisy accumulator’ models of perceptual processing suggest exists. What we've seen from you is interesting amd idosyncratic, but not monumentally compelling.

Notan is only one of the things the visual cortex needs for effortless and automatic word-recognition. It also needs well-formed and tractable positive and negative shapes, at the level of stems and bowls and counters, that it can readily assimilate or understand.

I would like to see your notan-sensitive liminography in action, preferably on you-tube, where I can see what you're doing, with a play-by-play voice-over of what you are thinking when you are doing, and an mri. I'm not interested in finished forms, just the self-imposed constraints and decisional feedback loops.

But perhaps its time for me to step back.

[Member hra…]

But breaking the black is a crap shoot, unless it’s done systematically

This is something I've wrestled with for a while. And it is in fact the flaw in Bloemsma's work (which I might have actually opined to him once - I forget). Like most designers, he's too Modernist. You have to let go. Life is a crap-shoot. Which is actually harder for me to work with than it is for most people, even for most designers. But that's not the same as random (which I'll never be a fan of).

So you take you liminographic tool of choice, you clear your mind of chirography, and you make notan. That's it.

Progress is hard.

Nothing that we’ve seen from you so far shows me that your method brings you any closer than Dwiggins or Bloemsma, or ....

Not an once of doubt about that. I haven't publicized the proto-implementations of my ideas yet (for various reasons). In fact my usable output remains firmly in the realm of parachirography (for which I publicly reprimanded myself during my talk in Mexico City by slapping my own hand :-). But admitting the problem is the first step (and -unlike most practitioners- I've gone quite a bit beyond that).

Maybe I'll never make anything usable with these ideas. But to me that's still better than never having good ideas to begin with; better than running a school to teach others to perpetuate a misconception (which really chaps my hide).

hhp

[Member enn…]

May I offer a suggestion?

Take a series of typefaces that you admire, set up as actual text made up of words; make a composite image if their proportions are compatible; introduce a large amount of blur, so you can't tell where the edges were; bring the resultant image into your font creation software as a template to draw over, or overlay a printout with tracing paper. Find notanically sensitive path-ways liminographically against / inside / in relation to the highly blurred template. Try to get an analytic handle on and formalize the resultant black and white shapes; throw it away and do it again with a different word.

Your shapes will be anchored in convention, but not directly disciplined by frontal arithmatic.

This is limino-palimsest.

[Member dbe…]

When the idea is about something entirely visual and utilitarian, but it never ever makes it to light nor usefulness, then it might not be considered "a good idea", just an idea. :)