Proportion – Fragments of Beauty

Why It Is Sometimes Sill(y) to Work in Metrics Window

elementi — Sun, 25 Nov 2018 14:23:37 +0000

I guess every (type) designer has his own methods allowing him to work more instinctively, those little tricks he uses to solve inconveniences that maybe only he himself sees in the regular process of work. What personally always struck me in particular while creating typefaces is the balancing act between what is supposed to be so tiny and on what we work while it is so big. To understand that maybe it is interesting to take a look back in the history of printing typefaces and how they have done it centuries before us. The so called punchcutters whom of the last we remember a genius as Charles Malin (which my personal history, strongly connected to the work of Giovanni Mardersteig’s Officina Bodoni, brought me near) used to engrave the final forms of an alphabet in the exact size that it was meant for. Of course, as it was a technical process that didn’t allow enlargement, zoom or reducing an intermediate shape to design*. It was “simply” (and these quotation marks should be typeset in 24 points, at least) chiseling the final letter form into a piece of steel from which the letter’s matrix was derived.

What he worked on was the final size, so he took perfect control over proportions as they are meant to be seen by the eye when reading.

What we do today, instead, is working on gigantic glyphs on an extra large monitor (or even 2 of them). Which is necessary to really have control of the Bézier curves, their points’ placements and tangent handlers’ adjustment. What we still need, though, is to have, at least, the same control over the final small letter image. So what I do in FontLab is combining to different windows while drawing. The expected Glyphs window, of course, showing me the Béziers construct and the Metrics window that is meant for defining the font’s letter spaces. And I do it in a quite strange way which sometimes slightly reminds me (I admit in terms rather philosophically) of the window sills that old Renaissance painters often put in their paintings to serve as kind of a leveling means to balance their composition by adding a horizontal bases to it at the bottom of the canvas. I keep the Metrics open in the way that they fill the whole monitor and place different letter pairings on it which I think could be helpful to compare similar letter forms or simply serve me as an inspiration. The small window sill, however, that is on the bottom of my screen is the glyphs window of the character which I am focusing on. So, with on click of the mouse I can jump from one to another. I choose and activate points or curve zones in the glyph, drag its window to the bottom (make it almost disappear) and then use the arrows on keyboard to correct points position or curve rounding (by activating the curve middle part) inside the glyphs window in the pushed aside but still active foreground. While doing so I do not watch the construct itself but the image on the Metrics window (background). A more drastic way to compare the results is to copy the whole modified glyph’s Bézier construct via keyboard and then revert the font to the latest saved state. The former glyph can then be deleted (still only looking on the Metrics) and replaced by the newer result of the computer’s clipboard. Then, back and forth via keyboard and so on. Probably this may seem quite funny for someone who uses a second monitor but it is the way of working I always preferred, I don’t know why. Maybe because it does not force my head to move from left to right. And, of course, it is not always an ideal means as I quite often tend to spoil the Béziers construct harmony too quickly by elongating too much curve tangents or neglecting the fact that while moving points also their handlers have to be shortened, elongated etc. (which I would probably not, watching the oversized construct in full resolution so to say) I just guess this is on the reasons that I never have chosen the path to really become a professional type designer. As I am just doing things quite in my own way, more for the feeling of it: less calculated, more by intuition. Or, to put it in an other way, to keep some of the mystery that for my very personal of view type designing always had and will probably still have in the future.

*We would have to exclude here pantographic methods as preferred by Frederic Goudy and others which, in fact, was a solution to draw the letter in a drastically enlarged stencil and reduce it then mechanically via the pantographic machine which engraved the matrices for the final alphabet’s size.

Arbeit an Kapitälchen

elementi — Sun, 10 Jun 2018 09:25:42 +0000

Bei der Zeichnung der Kapitälchen scheint es mir wichtig, dass die neuen kleinen Kapitalen nicht einfach nur verkleinerte Großbuchstaben sind.

Mehr als aber nur Proportionen und Stärkenverhältnisse der Linien, meine ich damit, dass man ihnen etwas auf den Weg geben muss, was sie zu eigenständigen neuen Buchstaben macht.

Magazine Layout for the Web

elementi — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 16:26:54 +0000

On the return of a recent journey to Italy I was annoying myself on the airport and, thus, bought me quite an older book about Richard Avedon photography. Beautiful inspiring photographs, but what, by far, struck me most were some of those smaller pictures added on the margins of the pages: demonstrating how they were composed in Harper’s Bazaar magazine pages of the forties, fifties and beginning sixties by genius art director Alexey Brodovitch. It was such a stunning way to divide and subdivide spaces between blocks of typography, white areas, finally, even in relation to the composition of the images themselves. I, at once, recognized dozens of obvious proportions referring clearly to the Golden cut, also blank spaces bordering text blocks within sober squares in a repeatingly degressive mode, thus beginning with big ones on the outer side down to smaller ones nested in their inside. Moreover, I said to myself, these weren’t the results of a meticulous calculation but rather instinctive games of a superb layouter as he was.

A tendency to return exactly to that point from which we started. I am talking of explicit and distinctive magazine layout.

Now, what we can take over into our times of such splendid examples? I guess we have to talk about user interface (ui) design in the first place. It is since long the most important discipline to aim at for excellent typography as it gathers all what is displayed on electronic devices rather than using paper. In my web design beginner years at the start of this century I remember that we were so much fascinated by the new facilities which the monitor design gave to us, such as animation in the first place. We were tempted, and I think we were right at that time to do so, to try everything that brought us as far as possible away from static paper layout. Whereas for now there seems to exist a clear tendency of modern webpages and applications, at least in those of them trying to introduce some elevated style and elegance, to return exactly to that point from which we started. I am talking of explicit and distinctive magazine layout.

Moreover, I said to myself, these weren’t the results of a meticulous calculation but rather instinctive games of a superb layouter as he was.

And this is, by far, much more difficult as it may seem at a first glance! That is because we are confronted with a seemingly almost uncontrollable variety of devices and monitor sizes. Thus, modern grid systems developed refined methods to keep proportions (things that for many reasons before CSS3 were only very hard, if not impossible to achieve) neat and clear, and scale them up and down in a horizontal and vertical direction. Some pages as www.chanel.com base their concept on absolute positioning techniques employing Javascript recalculation. Meanwhile, almost unrecognized, there is another fine means to achieve similar things with pure CSS. Since CSS3 was introduced we have measures as vw and vh, instead of percentage and rigid pixel widths. That allows our elements to act relative (in all circumstances and independent of their surrounding containers) to our outer viewport size and proportion, in consequence, leaving us the choice to treat the latter like a magazine page. What seems little and certainly not one of the most breathtaking news of the web (but in fact it is fairly much!) gives back to us designers the possibility to act just as those ancient brillant layouters. We regain control of the division of spaces between text, white room and photography, being free to do collages etc. And many of new cool and elegant applications will take advantage of this, I am convinced! On my own homepage (www.stefanseifert.com) relaunch I try to rely purely on viewport size relative measures. That is not only in horizontal sense, but also for rigorous vertical distribution of all elements keeping respective distances chained to page boundries, in both length and width. To conclude, while I am dragging my browser window to control how my layouts adapt themselves harmoniously I enjoy a side glance at those adorable Bazaar pages in my new “old” book: being so proud of, at least, trying to get close to what those great artists had achieved before us and, thus, participating to pass it on to a demandful, exciting future!

Working on Reflection ‘8’

elementi — Sat, 06 May 2017 07:52:15 +0000

When it comes to certain work processes, the evolving of a letter design, as an example, things are really getting complicated to describe, if not almost impossible. So many subtle influences slip into the mind of the designer. Glyph designs, while progressing, influence on each other, much of the drawing results appear necessary to be revised once you started with elaborating their spaces, and so on. I always played with the idea in my mind to describe those kind of things one day, so that others could follow it in a way and maybe even get something out of it for their designs. But as hard as I tried to keep taking screenshots and write little essays about phases of my work, I never succeeded. It is just to complex and the things that you see and feel about a certain curve or Bézier segment to redraw for someone else are hardly reproducible. Find an excerpt of such an attempt and let me, at least, the tiny hope to not have wasted my time entirely. And what is most important: be inspired! I decided to enlarge a little the inner center form of the upper bowl after I had inserted 4 new points to add a longer, almost straight line transitional area between the two bowls instead of connecting them by a single turning point in the middle. One reason was to adapt it better to the very fine and gracile ‘R’ of this character. By the way, I quite consciously left here the path of having exact same hairline thickness relation between numbers and capitals, at least for now. After all, for me its obvious that the strength of the excellent Renaissance fonts does not derive from their precise measures but from the outstanding capability that their creators had in making their forms match in feeling and subtleness, instead. (In addition, due to the generous ‘circles’ they seem to have embedded in their inner and outer lines). Speaking of those ‘nested circles’, the upper bowl on its inside was good enough for me right now, while the outer line on the left side (observing it with the letter image skipped upside down in metrics window) seemed to lack a little bit of blackness. […]
After all, for me its obvious that the strength of the excellent Renaissance fonts does not derive from their precise measures but from the outstanding capability that their creators had in making their forms match in feeling and subtleness, instead.
Added this (fortunately I already had an extra point in this outer curve dividing it into segments as I often do instinctively in the left down leading part in bowls like i.g. in the ‘8’ or ‘g’, before they get attached to the center part of the glyph) I felt that now the (almost) straight stroke connection had some trouble where it flows into the turning swing. This seemed only in part due to the fact that the newly created interim curve segment was too short to allow a smooth attachment, as to the well known problem of digital raster not allowing tangents to be exact on decreasing lengths. So I added some weight by pushing the curve a little bit towards the outside with the help of the direct curve segment tool (clicking and ‘dragging’ the curve in the middle between the points, which is, in fact, better done with the keyboard arrows) shifting both of the belonging tangents towards the inside a little to make them longer. At this point I returned with the view mode to the upright position in metrics window to maintain final control over the letter’s natural proportions. What I surprisingly found then was that, all of the sudden, I had much less dynamical ductus, which was originally caused by a slightly thicker stroke width on the left, right before it turns around in its swing and before entering the more straight part. I did not know at this point if this was a good thing or not. […]

Jenson

elementi — Wed, 27 Jul 2016 06:05:49 +0000

Many many years way back in the past during my university time I already started out with first researches around the Renaissance mother type of all characters the famous character named after Nicolas Jenson, storical printer and punchcutter whose origins were those of a goldsmith. I remember as if it was today when I was sitting in a café near my university and first opened my newly bought volume I of Daniel Berkeley Updikes «Printing Types, Their History, Forms and Use» and saw the double page of one of Nicolas Jensons’ printed pages. To tell the truth an overwhelming impression that never left my inspirational background of any of my later typeface creations (to tell the whole truth together with another slightly awkward impression anytime I decided to come back a little to my researches of that time: that of dealing with an heritage here to big to handle in any way) What struck me most was the eveness of such a page, the extraordinary harmony of letter widths and spaces that add up to create kind of a woven carpet out of singular letters. Since then I always preferred (and still do so) them to the later characters of Griffo which in the eyes of too many (for my opinion at least) is looked upon as a master for our modern text typefaces the so called Roman character (Germans prefer to call them Antiqua which is indeed slightly more specific for what concerns its origins). The characters of Griffo – which apparently later transformed into the ones of Claude Garamond and others – were narrower in their drawing and therefor establish a much more more tight overall rhythm on page. However they lack the genius more circular based proportions of Jensons typeface and therefor incidentally do not create such a harmony in rhythm. In the following pictures I try to sum up its basic principles and explain what became the basis of my own attempts to recreate part of its beauty in new typeface versions inspired by this unrivaled master in the history of printing type.