tone is a beautiful thing.
When I was 17 or so I wanted to study geology. Granted, there have been lots of things I’ve wanted to study. But I can still feel the fascination I had with rocks, tectonics, the formation of mountains. There’s something deeply beautiful about realizing that they move – that everything moves, even mountains, those symbols of eternal stasis. On time scales where our entire existence is just a blip, rocks flow, oceans rise, mountains fold. To understand how these processes work, how they’ve shaped our surroundings! To pick up a rock and be able to tell how it fits into the overall scheme, and where in the chain of events it was produced, millions of years ago…

My final stonecarving piece for TypeMedia 1314

Perhaps not surprisingly, learning to carve letters in stone from Françoise Berserik was one of my favorite new discoveries during my year at TypeMedia. Soon after graduating, I decided to get my own tools and continue on – and Françoise kindly invited me to join her classes again with the following TypeMedia year. I’m very grateful for this, and I’m enjoying taking breaks from my digital work here and there to spend a few hours practicing this craft. It’s very analogue, and pretty slow, and requires a lot of focus, of being-in-the-moment.

Carving with TypeMedia 1415

Cutting into the stone is a rather dramatic effect; it presents a different view of the material, exposes it to the light that plays on it along the shapes you’re making. Carving is very much a dialogue with the stone: It’s hard to imagine interacting more deeply with a material. You learn about stone from a new angle: Does it break easily? What is its structure like? How well does it hold detail? Does it easily absorb power, or do you need to be gentle? Different types of rock react differently, and not all designs work in all kinds of stone.
A nice thing to realize is that just like mountains aren’t static, stone is not actually all that hard. At least it doesn’t feel like it when you carve. If you work with a sharp chisel, some stone can feel like butter that’s been in the freezer, or like clay, or like soap. (In my mind / muscle memory, white marble feels creamy, with occasional crunchy bits. Of course that’s creaminess on a much slower scale.) Stone is not just hard as stone, then; there are also very different ways hardness can manifest itself – stone can be tough, dense, crystalline or brittle, or a bunch of different adjectives that probably don’t even exist.

Cutting this O into grey marble I’ve been enjoying the rather dramatic patterning inside. The veins, in this case, are also quite a bit harder than the surrounding grey stone. (Very much a work in progress.)

Stonecarving, or carving letters in stone (for which the Dutch have a concise, if not exactly poetic term: letterhakken), also offers a very different perspective on letterforms: One which includes a third dimension, that changes with light and shade. If you cut letters with a classic V-cut, one of the most prominent features is the center line, where the two diagonal cuts meet at the bottom of the letter. This has to be considered in the drawing. For instance, for the current piece pictured above I figured I needed to redraw the N so that the joins would work, that the center line would be continuous (it’s not perfect… I know). That’s an entirely different approach than drawing an N for a print typeface, where a midline is imaginary at best and you’ll probably want to compensate and cheat to make the joins look less dark.

I still consider myself pretty much a beginner, so these notes need to be read as early things I’m learning. I can tell though that I’m slowly getting a bit more confident, a bit more practised, getting a better understanding of how the material works. That’s a nice feeling. Although “of course you should never think that”, as Françoise told me last week; for just when I was thinking that this was all beginning to feel a bit more manageable, a big piece of stone chipped off the corner of a ‘T’… so much for focus. Mostly, though, carving is not as worryingly delicate as I originally feared, at least not during the entire process. Sure, there is no Undo, but carving is an iterative way of building letterforms – which to me seems so much less scary than having to make letters in one go, as in calligraphy. You’re building a letter slowly, from the inside out; many mistakes or imprecisions can be fixed as you go ahead, tap for tap.

I do hope I can go on learning and practicing letterhakken for many years. It’s not a very practical hobby to have – it’s noisy and dusty and you have to carry heavy things around – but it’s a beautiful craft to learn, and I would very much recommend it to people who like letters and craft and, perhaps, stone. It requires patience, yes. But what technique, relating to letters, does not?

Manicule in white marble

Exploring parametric lettershapes for Just van Rossum’s Python class. There is no “master” design here: Outline structures are defined as models and instantiated using a number of parameters. Other fun Python things included some recursive letters and the beginnings of the word-o-mat.

My stone for Françoise Berserik’s letter-carving class. Stonecarving was fascinating and opened up new perspectives on lettershapes and spaces. This piece was inspired by a sign error in my Python script that got me thinking about negative serifs.

Penglia, a family based on writing with the broad-nib pen, for Peter Verheul’s class. We sketched six variants (low, normal, and high contrast) in roman and italic; my regular contrast ones are furthest along, especially the italic. Like the writing itself, this was really hard for me.

A potential Greek companion to Erik van Blokland’s Eames Century Modern for Peter Bilak’s class. This was a fascinating, if quite brief exploration.

Michiel is my revival of an early typeface of J. M. Fleischman’s. The revival, taught by Paul van der Laan, was my favorite project in the first semester. This face feels less elegant and sparkly than Fleischman’s later work, softer and rougher at the same time; I’ve come to quite like it. There is only one style so far, but that one is pretty much complete. I’m thinking about expanding it further.

My contribution to the Chinese Whispers project with Typeradio and HBKSaar (see background and context on the Typeradio website). I would’ve never thought drawing a monospaced upright script with two layers could be this much fun. Sounds like the most useless thing ever, no? I’m still thinking about picking it up again.

And finally, a look at Mica, my graduation typeface:

More of Mica will be shown soon on the upcoming TypeMedia 2014 website.

My desk with about two-thirds of my wall space for presentation week.

The first-semester project I am most excited about (although this is a really close call with the Python and the stonecarving) was the revival. When looking for a book with an interesting typeface to revive I had come across one that looked vaguely like Fleischman, but a bit more old-style, softer and less sparkly, with lower contrast. After a bit of research, the typeface turned out to be indeed by Fleischman, but/and one of his earliest ones – cut in his first three years in the Netherlands, when he was between 22 and 25 years old. I loved working on this; it taught me tons not just about design but also about how to structure and document such a process. Also, a great excuse to learn more about Fleischman, punchcutting, and Dutch foundries in the 18th century.

Michiel, my revival of Fleischman’s 1730–1732 Mediaan for Uytwerf.

I’ve probably said this before, but I can tell that I’m learning tons – I’m growing, in what I can draw, in what I want to draw, in what I see. The different tools and media and approaches and questions of the first semester have all given me new perspectives on lettershapes.
One thing that’s very much under construction is that I now find the type I made pre-TypeMedia tends to be static, and kind of cold. Probably a combination of my Swiss background, preference for simple shapes, and propensity for working directly in a digital environment. And the fact that I like to be in control and I’m tense. (That’s what Françoise sees, my amazing stonecarving teacher. She sees it in my writing, too. I know she’s right.)

It’s not like I think all that is fundamentally wrong (well, except the tenseness maybe). I like (seemingly) simple designs over complicated and ornate ones, and I’m not a fan of type that is overly imitative of writing. But one thing I’m trying to absorb from all this Dutchness around me is to get a little more life into the lines I draw. I’m still exploring what exactly that means, but sketching seems to help (as it does overall with contrast, rhythm, proportion, spacing etcetera).

And sketching will be filling most of my waking life in the coming weeks, apparently. I’m excited to be starting out with the final project, looking ahead at weeks of playtime. (Bear with me: I won’t share for a while what I’m working on; it’s still a very fragile little plant.)
“Go explore the designspace” they said. FOR A MONTH. I can’t even remember the last time I had this much time to play, and explore, and try out things, and fail, and try out tools, and ideas, and navigate the designspace and have enough time to sail really far out. I’m telling you, TypeMedia is some elaborate typographic form of paradise.

Now, but. If we gave all of them the original shape and had them trace that directly, and if we gave them precision tools and enough time, and if we used only people specifically trained to draw precisely and well, surely they’d be able to faithfully reproduce the line, and would all end up with the same result, right?

Wrong. At least if we look at it on the level of precision involved in drawing complex little shapes like letters. What happens in “tracing” within one single step, through the lens of an individual’s eye, hand, and overall approach has recently been explored in depth by Erik van Blokland in his digitization experiment: He sent a scan of a lowercase Caslon “n” to typeface designers asking them to digitize it. No two n’s were the same – here are 80 of them:

(Another view, on Flickr)

How much of type history is an incidental byproduct of these two effects (individual deviation within a single step, and the diverging effect of combining multiple tracing/reinterpretation steps)? Many of the fonts we use today are revivals based on previous conversions based on earlier versions based on retracings based on prints of some perhaps long-lost original set of punches. How much of their current shape goes back to artefacts born from translation – from one designer to another, one technology to another, one medium to another? Typographic Chinese whispers.

Also the next time someone says 2 digital fonts “incidentally” have the same point coordinates I’m going to throw something heavy at them. Like those videos above.