Typeface by non-white designer/typographer?

[John Hudson]

James Evans and the Rossville Mission Press.

PS. Be sure to check out Ross Mills' reconstruction of some of Evans type making processes.

[BeauW]

To answer the original question:
Akira Kobayashi is the first name that came to mind. (Or rather I should say- he came to mind, and then I had to search for his name.) I admire his work, and remember he had some really interesting things to say about designing a Latin typeface from a non-native perspective.

[Joshua Langman]

Saara:

You should get a copy of a book called Language Culture Type which was published by ATypI a few years ago and celebrates the contributions of type designers around the world.

http://www.amazon.com/Language-Culture-Type-International-Unicode/dp/193...

[hrant]

Akira Kobayashi ... had some really interesting things to say about designing a Latin typeface from a non-native perspective.

I'm a big fan of Akira as well, so I'd love to learn more details about this.

hhp

[altsan]

I dabbled a little in Japanese calligraphy, although I always wished I could study it in more detail. (I was just looking into joining a local class when the earthquake and subsequent evacuations put paid to that, unfortunately.)

I have grown quite interested in looking at the internal consistency of Japanese fonts, with respect to how they combine the Latin and Japanese glyph sets. It's rare to find the Japanese font which uses Latin characters that aren't painfully generic. M+, which is IMO one of the more attractive Japanese text fonts, uses a Latin set that looks extremely similar to Frutiger and Myriad. (And that's one of the better examples - at least those are fairly nice Latin glyphs, if not very original.) Of course, it goes both ways - Monotype's pan-Unicode WorldType fonts from the 1990s, for example, use extremely generic Japanese characters (although to be fair, their Latin is pretty unimaginative too). One of the things I want to experiment with is in designing fonts with an internally consistent character style between Latin and Japanese (which still "fits" both writing systems).

[hrant]

It's nice to be ambitious, but be warned: enforcing too much formal consistency between scripts almost always results in a loss of authenticity as well as functionality. It's not impossible for scripts to share attributes (I [try to] do that all the time) but the limits are typically pretty severe.

hhp

[Ryan Maelhorn]

enforcing too much formal consistency between scripts almost always results in a loss of authenticity as well as functionality

This is a hard lesson, but an important one.

[Nick Shinn]

But surely a good design is formally consistent across scripts, without privileging any one to the detriment of the other(s).

How is this a different problem than consistency between letters in the same script?

It’s easy (with competent production skills) to produce a consistent alphabet—if you stick to convention.
(I believe this is Alex’s point.)
The hard part is to find a way to make the whole thing interesting and new, without the novelty of individual glyphs protruding.

[hrant]

Maybe we mean different things by "formally consistent".

Let me try this example, which is something I run into regularly: if you're making an Armenian companion to a typical Latin serif font formal consistency requires it to be upright, and to have serifs in the same places; but this results in an ungainly, low-readability mess.

How is this a different problem than consistency between letters in the same script?

On some level at least maybe it's not!

hhp

[dezcom]

"formal consistency requires it to be upright, and to have serifs in the same places"

Requires? I don't see it. Formal consistency must be incredibly rigid to you? Formal consistency is what you make of it. It can be lock-step rigid, as you seem to imply, or simply a kin to. There is a difference between identical twins and 2nd cousins but both are family.

[hrant]

I myself do apply "formal consistency", just very gently. But the way Nick expressed it, it sounds like the sort of thing I hear from people who for example put too many serifs on Armenian ("too many" because our "x-height" has a much higher proportion of verticals).

It's notable BTW that some designers are much more restrictive than even I am: they feel that matching the color is the only thing that should be done. I myself think there's -usually- more room to play than that; in fact even color can actually be sacrificed if that helps balance the apparent sizes (which is more important).

hhp

[dezcom]

It is mostly a visual thing instead of a measurement thing. The x height of Greek to Latin, for me, is not the same. People read with their eyes, not with a micrometer :-)

[hrant]

The x height of Greek to Latin, for me, is not the same.

Exactly! But do note that most fonts do have them the same. Why? Because humans like to line things up, and when they're observing letterforms consciously = display typography, it's admittedly nice; but not for immersive reading; and sometimes not for cultural integrity either.

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

But the way Nick expressed it, it sounds like the sort of thing I hear from people who for example put too many serifs on Armenian.

And that’s what also generally happens to me on the first pass of a serifed Greek lower case derived from a Latin.

But then the goal is to work within that parameter of having fewer serifs than the Latin, and nonetheless achieve consistency of overall text colour, and consistency of scale of detail.

Because, apart from overall “style” (e.g. shape of curves and ductus), those are the cross-script consistencies to aim for, or else the two scripts will look like different weights and different sizes.

[dezcom]

" those are the cross-script consistencies to aim for, or else the two scripts will look like different weights and different sizes."

Yes, but how do you do this? I assume you have no formula or set of specifications to follow? I assume you just work on it until you feel you have achieved a sufficient family resemblance to make the differing scripts work together without being jolted out of conscious reading.
I think when we write down an exact recipe for consistency, that we are at that moment doomed to failure. Because different scripts came to be in different ways, there is no Rubrics' Cube solution. Type designer Humans just have to do the work so that other Humans can simply read it without having to consult a cypher.

[hrant]

consistency of overall text colour, and consistency of scale of detail.

This is what I don't believe in, because the functionality of a [text] face doesn't come from formal attributes, especially when you factor in differences in how cultures see forms; such formal consistency ignores tradition (which harms functionality). For example, a "literal" Cyrillic Trajan cannot mean the same thing for Russians as Trajan does for Westerners.

To me -in a text face- the correct way to approach it is "multi-laterally": start form the scripts individually and see where they can meet; and very often they simply can't get close enough to satisfy the important requirements (which for one thing doesn't include the conscious appreciation of alignment) so you snap away (for example by not forcing the "x-height"s to align).

hhp

[John Hudson]

It should be clear that formal consistency can mean different things; indeed, allows different approaches to the same design situation. We touched on this in another thread recently, when we discussed what makes it possible to create more than one viable companion for a type in one script in another script, each picking up different formal aspects of the common 'target'.

[hrant]

Yes, that was/is an interesting angle and a good point*. However (and I'm not sure I ended up opining this on that thread) the closer your intentions are to "pure reading" the less room you have to pick and choose which formal parameters to play with.

* In fact I can in retrospect say that that's how my Nour&Patria is built.

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

…the functionality of a [text] face doesn't come from formal attributes…

By “consistency of overall text colour”, I mean between the two scripts, so that they both appear to be the same weight of font. This is a reasonable expectation for typographers to have, tasked as they often are with balancing the import of blocks of different-script text, side by side on the same page. You don’t want your Greek to look like Regular and your Latin to look like Semibold.

Similarly, with “scale of detail”, you don’t want your Roman to look like a body face and your Greek to look like an agate.

Weight and optical size are formal attributes of a typeface, and they have to be consistent between scripts, or else the settings of at least one of the scripts will require so much tweaking by the typographer that the font becomes dysfunctional for multi-script layouts.

[hrant]

Consistent color is generally a good thing in my view, but thinking "let's start with serifs where they would be in Latin and maybe take some out so the two scripts look closer" isn't.

As for trying to match apparent size (which I've never heard of as "scale of detail") as I said I agree that it's very important (mostly because you don't want people feeling inferior). That said it's possible to counter-balance that with color (i.e. make one script smaller but darker than the other) especially if you simply can't make the apparent sizes close enough - think of combining Latin and Arabic.

hhp

[Bendy]

Want to come back to the ideas of this thread later, once I've properly formulated the problem that's been troubling some of us all year in Reading, basically that the same formal characteristics of a design may be either very very conventional or completely alien in a different script. What some call the 'atmospheric values' of a typeface depends entirely on socio/cultural associations; where formal characteristics may connote a very different era or mood in a different script. For example the broad nib convention in Latin doesn't work well in Thai, where expansion serves the letterforms more historically accurately, as well as more aesthetically. Sorry, I appear to be speaking in fragments.

[hrant]

Somewhat fragmented, but entirely valid. :-)

And a favorite example I like to use happens to be from Thai culture:
http://www.davestravelcorner.com/photos/thailand/Statue-Bangkok.jpg
(I couldn't find the picture I once took of those statues unfortunately.)
They look kinky-evil to Westerners, but not to Thais.

depends entirely on socio/cultural associations

Greatly, yes, but not entirely; there are still some things that unite us as humans, for example the power of the color red, the instability of the inverted triangle, and so many more things.

hhp

[Bendy]

Ha, here's another one of the kinnari from Bangkok's Grand Palace.

Anyway, what I'm trying to get at is the way that one needs to understand the traditions of a culture in order to avoid unwittingly imposing models or formal characteristics that have different associations. What this boils down to (at least for me) is that in multi-script typefaces, one may need to look beyond a single stroke model as the unifying element, and instead tie things together with atmospheric values, by which I mean the associations and preferences of the target readership, something which is very difficult for a complete outsider to grasp. One thing that I consciously kept in mind when creating Lumen Thai was to draw 'Thai' curves, which meant sometimes going against the shapes that came naturally out of my hand. Also it meant discarding the Latin stroke model and matching things in other ways: in terms of colour (though I've since realised Thai does need to be lighter because of the amount of superscript and subscript activity and lack of wordspaces), and by aiming for a humanist feel, though in the Thai the swelling stroke of a flexible nib is as conventional as the broad-nib in Latin, so the implementation of that humanist feel is executed differently.

[hrant]

Kinnari, eh? Good to know the term. But you really need to show the tail, and I do mean tail. :-)
http://www.luxury-thailand-travel.com/images/Kinnari-5.JPG

in multi-script typefaces, one may need to look beyond a single stroke model

As you know I believe that's true even within just Latin. Without the "may". :-)

hhp

[Saara]

Wow.
I'm happy to have kicked off such a lively and interesting discussion!
Thanks to everyone, so many great points and advice!