Tiffany Wardle Memorial Liveblogging™ of a presentation at ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

Insua is a man and is, ostensibly, Spanish (he called his accent Spanish, though the conference handbook called him Portuguese; his slide says he’s a Ph.D. student at Universitat de Barcelona). He arrived late for his own funeral, but then again, everything is running late here and the rooms are so far apart as to be on distinct continents. And he proceeded to mostly read from his notes, a fatal mistake.

“An approach to a tentative Grotesk typology”: Borrows characteristics of the Scotch roman from the first half of the century. (Shows Akzidenz), perhaps the paradigm of the grotesk. Beside the absence of serif, there is a monolinearity, a certain geometrization and homogenization of upper-case letters with closing of bowls, and reductionism of some details, like the one-storey g. These make the grotesk model most distant from the roman, conceptually and artistically. The old-style moderns (like, presumably, Franklin) are more in that vein.

“Sansserif: From subordinate to alternative to roman”: Was restricted mostly to jobbing and titling originally, as you know, but now it is valid for all kinds of typographic tasks, text setting included. It is in fact an alternative for any task – you choose either serif or sansserif. The great leaps forward in this path would take place in Germany, but the grotesk typology plays a first key role there. It is the model for the New Typography first and for Swiss typography later (shows slides).

“A conjectural view on the beginnings of fully-fledged sansserif”: Not talking about its absolute rhythms. We do not context that the first Latin letter without serifs is the one by William Caslon IV. But the German sansserifs might have taken the first significant steps by themselves. Here, it does not mean starting from scratch; taking context into account, that might be incidental. When the two-line Egyptian was published, characters without serifs were common in e.g. inscriptions. The path was putting it on a level with roman.

(Shows samples.) More weight, better coördination, more refinement. These are all from late 19h century. Grotesk typefaces obviously intended for text setting rather than eye-catching. (Shows another specimen from 1908, but I didn’t catch the name. Royal-Grotesk?) Is a forerunner for Akzidenz. Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Is this the first sansserif typeface, and, moreover, for an intellectual publication? So it seems, according to Bayer. (Shows slide of both fonts, nearly identical down to line lengths.) A history of Akzidenz is still to be done. It’s a thing that has been on the table for some time, but still waiting for someone to take this and trace the complete genealogy of this very well-known, important typeface. But most publications from that Academy are set in a Scotch roman.

(There are no publications on the history of the grotesk, even in German, compared to say in the U.K. about British history.)

(Says this is a basic research schedule and the hypothesis will be either confirmed or refuted. But he has no results!)

“A history of heroes: Brief notes on the basic typographic historiography” (sic).

It’s very interesting that German people have not carried out this research at the moment. (Aaand… that’s it. Again. There was some solid Q&A, with rather a lot more information, untranscribed, about where to look for antecedents.)

Tiffany Wardle Memorial Liveblogging™ of a presentation at ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

This big bald German – really, you can pretty much wrap it up right there – designed Fago (worst name of a typeface ever), Officina weights, Info. Is about an extremely little-known designer from the GDR. He comes from type lettering, not only handlettering. Karl-Heinz Lange. (Shows early templates to teach you to draw your own typefaces on a grid. Some very bold and expressive from the 1960s.) But this is not what you saw at the Helvetica film, but this is very different. I think different will make it. Readability is important, but some things have to be different. (Shows VW vans hand-decorated.)

Wrote a 28-page book, 1963, on how to draw typefaces. Construction diagrams. But he just needed 28, not the several hundred pages, to show it to people who had never heard of typography and should be able to draw things on their own. Constructed sansserif typefaces. Quite interesting because a lot of things are based on it, even the supergrotesk, which is basically very common – Futura is based on such sketches. There’s no need to search for these fonts; you can draw them on your own in simple ways. Shows a handlettering one with a capital ß. We still discuss this form now. It is available to be put into Unicode. A few issues later, he had to throw it out because people didn’t want to see it because it was too modern; today it’s still modern. [continue with: Ole Schäfer: ‘Bringing typefaces to life’ →]

Tiffany Wardle Memorial Liveblogging™ of a presentation at ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

I thought, as a new member of ATypI, I’d better just establish some credentials. (Shows slide of a a railway engine and reams of text. Took him seven years.) And it shows my other affliction, which is a love of steam locomotion, which is probably due to being born in that house (shows house overshadowed by train right nearby). Gill Sans was used for the numbering and naming of the locomotives and was later adopted and nationalized by British Railways. That established my passions at a very early age, something like five. [continue with: Gerald Fleuss: ‘The legacy of Edward Johnston’ →]

Si was a Reading graduate, Tom Phinney says.

DANIELS: How many people consider themselves type designers (One-third.) Web designers? (Few.) Kind of a half-and-half split. I’m lead PM at Microsoft for fonts. I work with all the product groups at Microsoft and with outside designers for anything that ships with fonts. I work with Peter Constable, who owns the font technology aspect – shaping engines, Fonts folder, things like that.

The font-embedding story covers the fonts and our relationships with font vendors and the technology side. Technology that supports embedded fonts in all our applications is something that Peter wrote. I’ve been involved in font embedding for 10 or 12 years at Microsoft, and even as an intern in 1995. [continue with: Simon Daniels: ‘Web font embedding rides again!’ →]

Tiffany Wardle Memorial Liveblogging™ of a presentation at TypeTech, ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

(I missed some of the historical discussion.) Not much later, we have a radically different approach: In Bauhaus, they really fancied the circle. It depicts other things, not just an abstract piece of art. It was really used in a dogmatic way (shows hemispheric teapot). In the ’60s, we began to have these really free-form shapes, and that’s where Bézier curves come in. Also in architecture. Just the fact that the curves were popular then is a matter of the style of the period. Car design (shows a Citroën DS): Ærodynamics, but also clearly a design decision here. They are very clean, but they are not constructed like the Bauhaus.

So these curves actually come from France: Pierre Bézier, 1962. Both font formats use Bézier curves, except that PostScript uses third-order or cubic and TrueType uses second-order or quadratic. A spline is always an addition of several curves. B-splines are not Bézier splines but base splines and are not used in fonts, so become a bit suspicious if anyone tells you they are. They might not be a real expert. [continue with: Tim Ahrens: ‘Computer-aided design: Taming the curves’ →]

TED HARRISON: We get calls asking: How do I make my fonts in colour, or greyscale? Well, you can use XML and PNG and suddenly you get all the things you don’t get in outline fonts. But photofonts suffer from some of the same drawbacks as bitmap fonts, especially when it comes to the Web. [continue with: Ted Harrison & Yuri Yarmola: ‘Flash photofonts – the holy grail of Web typography?’ →]

Liveblogging a presentation at TypeTech, ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

Tries to distinguish between technical and artistic work, like Pierre di Sciullio’s. On the other hand, there’s historical research, and University of Reading is doing historical research on books for children. My project is in developing a font for children with low vision. It’s in the domain of universal design, so as not to exclude specific groups of users. [continue with: Ann Bessemans: ‘Typography for children with low vision’ →]

Liveblogging a presentation at TypeTech, ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

(Юрий Ярмола is a developer of FontLab.) What I’m going to discuss is how to improve rendering of your fonts on the screen. This task can have different approach. On the one side, screen resolution increases, and we have new technologies for font smoothing, like ClearType and something from Apple. So everyone almost entirely moved to LCD screens, and we now have the subpixel rendering there. So the technical result is like 300 dpi, which is exactly what we had on laser printers ten years ago. [continue with: Yuri Yarmola: ‘Crystal clear: Tuning your fonts for screen’ →]

Liveblogging a presentation at TypeTech, ATypI Brighton 2007 (q.v.)

I arrived late after having to be guided over hill and dale to find the conference room. The full title is “Pretty features: Best practices in defining and implementing OpenType layout features for European fonts.” Adam Twardoch may be the last living European wearing a fauxhawk. [continue with: Adam Twardoch: ‘Pretty features’ →]