Interesting[?]

[timd]

Margraph (latin/greek construction)

Downside is it sounds like European nobility (although I like the word)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margrave

Tim

[hrant]

What's the Latin for painting?

hhp

[Andy Martin]

pictura, from pict- ‘painted’ (from the verb pingere).

[hrant]

Hmmm, I'm thinking we're finally close to a good term for drawing (as opposed to painting/chirography), which is really great! Maybe "margography". But the ideal for this animal is something that combines something like "border" with something like "chiro" or "painting"...

hhp

[dezcom]

How about Charro? :-)ChrisL

[duncan]

This goes back several posts now:

>> Maybe you are thinking about getting into interior decorating…?

>Well, I’ve always wanted to do clothing design.
>But I’m curious how you got that idea from the protoglyph?

When I tried to find a definition for "protoglyph" a recurring theme was primitive drawings on the walls of caves. So I was playing with the long shot that you were implicating "wall art" based on your use of the word "protoglyph."

It was silly and a stretch :-)

Duncan

[ebensorkin]

Liminography !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality

From the wikipedia

"Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is the quality of the second stage of a ritual in the theories of Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, and others. In these theories, a ritual, especially a rite of passage, involves some change to the participants, especially their social status.
The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition, during which your normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to something new.
People, places, or things may not complete a transition, or a transition between two states may not be fully possible. Those who remain in a state between two other states may become permanently liminal."

I am suggesting this because the process I am seeing & hearing you think about seems all about process, looking for new methods as in 'technique', but also of thought, and is also concerned with both white and black in terms of their relation or threshold rather than in terms of themselves. And 'liminal' is already a solid academic term. So ya got that cred built right in.

Happy?

[hrant]

I love it - the existential angle is right on.
(Although to be clear I mean for drawing, not this thing.)

BTW Duncan, you were thinking of petroglyph, right?

hhp

[eliason]

I think the distinction you're sketching here is the same as (or at least analogous to) the dichotomy between "linear" and "painterly" theorized by one of the "founding fathers" of the discipline of art history, Heinrich Wölfflin.

And even before Wölfflin, there are theories of art coming out of Italy that distinguish disegno ("design" or "drawing," epitomized by Florentines like Michelangelo) from colorito ("colorism," epitomized by Venetians like Titian). The term "disegno" in particular is often left in the Italian because "drawing" doesn't entirely capture the additional meanings of composition, limitation, demarcation, etc.

So maybe you've been "disegning"? :-)

[dezcom]

I am liking "Liminography" Eben!

ChrisL

[timd]

Damn, if I wasn’t a designer I wanted to be a neologist, this could have been my chance of immortality:)

Out of curiosity, Hrant, which way up did you draw the liminograph, where was the starting point, were you standing or sitting, where did the line wander off to?

Tim

[hrant]

Well if you ever switch get yourself a
toga: it's the official dress of neologists.

--

I must have been standing up, because I was testing/warming-up a "non-trusted" pen, which I typically only do when I'm in a hurry. And the orientation you see is pretty much how I was looking at it.

As for the starting point (and thus direction) it's strange that I'm actually not totally sure. Normally I'd start something like that either going up rightward, or going down leftward (which I think is normal right-hander action) but this is neither. Looking at it some more though I suspect it was most probably started from the bottom-right loose end. Where did it wander off to? I think it must have ended pretty soon afterwards, either just straight or with a small reverse-flick.

BTW, what about "chiroliminal" for this?

hhp

[hrant]

I figured to do a quick digitization of the proto-8:

It's based on a 20-degree rotation of the scan, and the bottom-right cross-over has been resolved... which of course makes it no longer "pure", chiroliminally - but typographically it's unavoidable. The alternative, contortive chirography, could also be seen as "impure".

hhp

[david h]

> most specifically I’m thinking about the making of glyphs in a text face (although I suspect it can be broader).

OK. I see. But why 2 terms -- drawing & painting, and not just designing glyphs?

> claiming that the former [painting] forms the bodies of shapes ... while the latter [drawing] forms the boundaries of shapes...

I think that the best term is line drawing, and not drawing (I know, as you said -- thinking about the making of glyphs but...):

This is line drawing/ drawing/ painting (?):

[hrant]

> But why 2 terms

Because the method (different than the tool) affects the results.
Painting the body of a glyph is different than drawing a notanic border.

BTW, there are a lot more than two ways.
In fact what I'm describing here is a third way.

> This is line drawing/ drawing/ painting (?)

I think it's a painting.
But since it's not a glyph, it doesn't matter (for the sake of staying focused).

hhp

[hrant]

OK then, let's make this [pseudo-]official:

Liminography (thanks, Eben) is the rendering of the black-white threshold. What type designers [are supposed to] do. This is one (strange) kind of liminography: chiroliminography.

Chirography BTW doesn't *have* to use a certain marking tool. The central concept is laying down a "black" mark by some movements of the hand/arm system. So you could say that chirography is a subset of painting. I would call this painting "pictography", but that's taken, and really "painting" is a fine word [here].

I do see some technical problems with this terminology structure, but nothing is perfect, so unless somebody manages to throw a capable wrench into it, this is what I'll be using.

hhp

[ebensorkin]

So for the sake of clarity chiroliminography is your new ord of coice. correct? Or was it Liminography?

[paragraph]

new ord of coice. correct?
Not really.

[hrant]

Well, this thing is chiroliminographic, but that's a pretty exotic subset of liminography. Liminography is basically when you make the black-white border the design constraint. In contrast, chirography is when you make the black body the design constraint.

Now, you might say that we necessarily make the black-white border no matter what we're thinking, but that's a mechanical issue; the ideological issue is what you believe as being important - your *intent* (and that *does* affect the results). The more you believe notan is important, the more you approach liminography (and I contest, better readability); the more you believe that something like the Moving Front is important the more you approach chirography (which I contest is an arbitrary constraint, so anti-design).

--

This "8" is made by hand, but it does not favor the black (which necessarily comes at the expense of optimal* notan). On the other hand, because it's "spontaneous" instead of deliberative & iterative this method can't really result in a proper text font; it's really just an interesting display font philosophy. The "normal" way to make an optimal* text font remains the equivalent of a refrigerator making ice!

* Not the same thing as "prefect", or even "ideal".

hhp

[ebensorkin]

Sorry about my appalling spelling.

Hrant, Thanks for clarifying!

[John Hudson]

If ‘optimal’ -- in the context of notan -- is not the same as ‘perfect’, or even ‘ideal’, then what does it mean? Presuming, based on common usage, that there can't be something ‘better than optimal’, we can at least agree that things can be more or less sub-optimal, closer to or further from optimal, however you are defining the latter. But in the context of notan I am wondering how you recognise these relative states of sub-optimisation. Declaring that favouring the black necessarily comes at the expense of optimal notation seems to me to be begging the question, because it suggests that you are assuming that optimal notan involves some kind of balance between black and white, whereas there are other possibilities, e.g. that it involves specific kinds of tension between black and white.

[Of course, we presume to talk about optimal typographic notan, i.e. functionally optimal for reading. In the more general sense of notan, I don't think it makes any sense to talk in terms of optimisation: notan is an aesthetic phenomenon.]

[hrant]

OK, maybe "optimal" and "ideal" are about the same. :-)
Although the latter does sound overly self-contented.

And I would say that "optimal" can make sense only within some boundaries against which it's pushing, so I agree that optimalness of notan only makes sense in context (and actually the context doesn't even have to be readability).

But in the context of readability, I do believe that marking the black blocks your path to optimal notan; it makes the letters qualitatively poorer at blending into boumas. This, no matter how much you *want* to make the white equal. Thomas Jefferson had children with Sally Hemings, but she was still a slave.

hhp

[nina]

"I do believe that marking the black blocks your path to optimal notan; it makes the letters qualitatively poorer at blending into boumas."
This is the one link I'm not getting: Why, exactly, is there a correlation between notan – in the sense of balancing the black and the white – and readability? Why exactly can Legato "tie" the letters together into more coherent boumas – or, asking the other way round: Why do you say (if I got that right) that we read the black *and* the white, as coherent wholes, rather than black figures against a white background?

[hrant]

Because letters have to be less themselves for boumas to be more themselves. When the whites "talk to each other", boumas are stronger.

The only time letters matter is when immersive reading breaks, for example when we run into an unfamiliar word; then letters have to be identifiable after (relatively) long foveal observation by the consciousness, which is very easy to ensure.

Our consciousness likes to separate and identify, so it sees individual active black things sitting on top of a uniform passive white background; but our consciousness is not what makes immersive reading work. The black cannot exist without the white - they are essentially one thing.

hhp

[hrant]

We will only have gone too far in optimizing reading notan when people have trouble identifying individual letters. We're still an Astronomical Unit away from that.

hhp