This is an idea I had for a font. The original letters are Helvetica treated with a vertical scale and a 30° shear to make them look more isometric. I had some help from a little script I wrote so much of it was an automated process but there was still a lot of manual tweaking to be done. I think some letters worked out better than others with this treatment so I guess I’ll try with another font that hopefully works better.

UPDATE (Oct 20)

I changed the font to Futura Extra Black BT and at the same time I increased the line width which worked out pretty well.

I think the thicker lines made all the difference so I reverted back to Helvetica and upped the width. Clearly better than the first version but I think I prefer Futura over Helvetica.

Now, first off, I did get the feeling that this was a too simple an idea to not have been made earlier.Rightly so, Moritz Resl did the same just a few weeks ago but I still have a lingering feeling that I’ve seen some sort of variant of this even further back.

Anyway, Stephen Coles - Editor of Typographica - was not impressed, he had this to say (full post here):

“It’s the sort of project that most designers have seen many times before they are even out of school.”

Perhaps it is, Stephen, but why come down so hard on it? Moritz didn’t, to my knowledge, make any claims to pioneer the font industry with this piece. Most likely he just got an idea and felt compelled to try it out.

Sometimes it seems that typographers are a group of over-zealous and pretentious people who have lost their ability to have fun and would rather be governed by their own strict rules. That’s what I like so much about FontStruct, the pure joy of having a creative outlet with no crippling rules as to how things should be.

On the plus side, Stephen did post two interesting links. One of them was to W. Bradford Paley, showing me another take on the average font.

The other link was to Kai Bernau’s The Neutral Typeface. Kai has put a lot more effort into his font, well worth a look. Anyway, I should return to my own stuff. The script I made was very simple, I compiled a list of fonts to be used in a loop that cycles through a string of characters and prints the characters once for each font in the list.

I can set the level of opacity as I wish, but with each letter being composed of 28 layers of different fonts somewhere between 5-15% seems to work best.

On each row a different opacity value have been used, the letters was then imported into Photoshop, blurred and finally a threshold adjustment layer was applied with three different values. In the result below, I used an opacity of 5%, pasted the chars into a high resolution (600dpi) Photoshop document, applied a 1px Gaussian Blur and three different (96, 128, 192) threshold levels.

The workflow is actually very similar to one of my own Scriptographer tools, about which I’ve written a small post here. The number of primitives have been expanded recently as well as the addition of a new feature here and there. Although the fonts created will probably be best suited as display fonts, I think it’s a really nice tool where one can try out various ideas without much trouble. It’s also great fun to just browse the multitude of user submitted fonts for inspiration. I will definately try out some ideas once my computer is working properly again…

I was a complete stranger to this magazine and I had never before heard about glitch art (although I was always curious as to how he designed the With Teeth and The Social Network record sleeves) but it seemed good enough for a one-year subscription. No regrets there, every page in this magazine is jam-packed with enormously inspiring images and there’s not even a single advert as well. Apparently, I’ve missed out on quite a bit, but luckily they are available for back orders so these are the ones I have picked up. Looking forward…

IdN: v17n6 – The Minimalism Issue

IdN: v17n2 – The Retro Graphics Issue

IdN: v16n3 – The Typography Issue

IdN: v15n5 – The Geometric Issue

IdN: v15n4 – The Infographics Issue

It has finally arrived, Designing Type by Karen Cheng. Apparently, this book is very hard to get hold of. It was sold out at Amazon so I ordered it from Barnes & Noble, got my ‘Your Order Was Shipped’-email and waited 10 days, only to get another mail saying that my order was canceled and my money would be refunded. That was it, no further info on why my book was returned to sender. After sending an angry mail demanding an explanation they claimed my address was somehow “undeliverable for an unknown reason”. Luckily, meantime, Amazon had gotten six more copies of the book in stock so I ordered it straight away. It took four days. Express delivery, totally worth it!

If the reviews I’ve read are to be trusted this is probably The Book of type design and no other book is even close to be as thorough. I have not yet had the time to sit down and read the whole thing but my first impression is that it is so full of information and minute details that it is almost overwhelming!

A good and very comprehensive review of the book from The Designers Review of Books can be found here.

I mentioned earlier in the Joshua post, I wouldn’t go through with all the hassle to make it into a typeface any time soon. Well, apparently that turned out to be false, as I was curious enough to wanna see how it might look. I spent a couple of hours to re-draw some of the letters (as well as adding a few that I hadn’t done yet), before I started the laborious, and mildly entertaining task of repeatedly switching programs and hitting the copy/paste-buttons.

If that wasn’t enough I had to start all over, from the beginning, as I managed to botch it just as I was finishing up due to some late night negligence. But on the plus side, I did learn a thing or two to reduce the workload the second time around.

Anyways, the font is almost complete now and all that remains to be done is some minor tweaks here and there and then it will be available for download. It’s my first attempt, mind you, so it’s bound to have some (or a lot of) glitches.

The font is monospaced with all caps and will probably be best suited as a display font as it is quite light and condensed.

A while back I mentioned the innovative game developers Introversion Software and in 2006 they released a game called DEFCON which caught my eye with its striking visuals and strong allusions to the 80′s kult-classic movie WarGames.

DEFCON is sort of a modern-day version of the old Amiga classic Nuclear War (which, in turn, was based on Flying Buffalo‘s card-game designed by Douglas Malewicki), sans the comedy.

“Gentlemen. You can’t fight in here. This is the war room.”

Ok, I admit. It’s a poor comparison, they are not even close, but both games does allow you (and, in fact, encourage you) to nuke the hell out of your opponents. Anyhow, DEFCON seem to have some very dedicated fans and a thriving modding community and voices where raised in the games forum expressing a wish to change the games default typeface (which seems to be Kremlin from DaFont by Vic Fieger) to more resemble that from the WarGames movie. I was surprised that there were no one who had already made it so I thought that this would be a fun thing to try out. Maybe if I reproduced it and gave it away for free, they would look at me in awe and accept me as their one, true saviour…

Well, most likely not, but still as I said, a fun project so I took some screenshots of some letters from the movie and drew them in Illustrator. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get screenshots of the complete alphabet so some of them are my own interpretation of what I think they would look like. They’re all caps and I intend to make two versions, one monospaced and one kerned. I still don’t know the name of the original font and truth be told I haven’t made that much research in the matter, either. So, it seem fit to name the typeface after the movies main antagonist, the AI – Joshua.

“Would you like to play a game?”

I am fairly happy with the outcome, being my first attempt at making a font, and I guess the plan is to turn it all to a working typeface, but right now it just seem to be too much of tedious tweaking and manual fiddling about. Guess my lack of persistence and laziness outweighs my messianic complex…

Some rainy day, maybe.

As you can see this results in a circle divided into 7 equal parts. Below, I have chosen to draw the letter ‘d’ which has a binary unicode value of ’1100100′. Well actually the correct value should be ’01100100′, eight digits, but somehow javascript omits the first ’0′ in standard Latin-1 as a letter from the extended Latin-1 such as ‘ö’ has a value of ’11110110′. Therefore, for now, my script will only print characters in the range of 32-127.

I have also added some functions to my script to set a number of values. These values determines the look of the cipher when printed, such as how much space between each character, the radius of each circle and line width ranging from 0.1pt to twice the radius (as in the example above, forming circle sectors).

Here is the output of the same Lorem Ipsum text but with three different styles.

Someone scribbled some incomprehensible symbols on a wall at my work some time ago. I have no clue what it reads or if they are even real letters. Probably just the work of some bored-out-of-his-wits zombie drone. Nevertheless, they looked somewhat real to me and seemed to follow some kind of inherent system. I let this percolate for some time until finally, the other day, I started to sketch out some very basic glyphs, as I had my morning coffee at Wayne’s sometime around two pm.

I quickly came up with 15 different types of symbols to be used as pairs, one upper and one lower. I subsequently organized them in a table and had the color coded like this.

The blue are glyphs that never will be used for reasons I will go into further down. Red and green are glyphs that are duplicates and the gray are totally unique. As my script works now I use all but the blue glyphs.

Now, the script just randomly picks two glyphs and puts one on top of the other. Nothing more than that. Well, other than I don’t need to have them pre-made as illustrator objects as each one of the 15 glyphs just exists as sequence of four ones and zeros in an array. The numbers tells the script what side, or sides, of a square will be drawn. Get it?

Well, like this.

First image is just to show in what order the sides will be read. The second image represents a glyph that in my array consequently would read 1100.

In order to not have the script draw the same line twice – as is the case with the blue ones – I put this rule in that don’t allow the upper glyphs third side and the lower glyphs first side to pair up. Got that?

First pair is not allowed, instead there are two other combinations to choose from.

Aside from that, I put in a bunch of other features such as, glyph size, stroke width, stroke caps, glyph spacing, number of glyphs, a unique glyphs only-button et cetera…

Thick stroke, square caps and tight spacing.

Slim Stroke, square caps and tight spacing.

Thick stroke, round caps and tight spacing.

Well, if anything it does kinda resemble some sort of alien sci-fi font… for whatever time I would need one…