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.

(* One thing you don’t get a lot of is time, such as for writing proper lengthy blog posts.)

Back row, left to right: Alexandre, Slávka, James, Hugo, David; front row: Mark, Mark, me – we were staring into the setting sun, and this is about two seconds after I gave up. Photo taken by Jan Willem Stas.

I’m not going to apologize again for not posting more, mostly because I don’t like feeling like a broken record, and jump right into a story I’ve been wanting to tell: That of our excursion to Museum Enschedé in Haarlem, the archive of Joh. Enschedé en Zonen, printing business and focus point of the rich history of Dutch typefounding.

The roots of Enschedé reach back into the very matter I was researching earlier this (academic) year in my revival project: The typefoundry that Johann Michael Fleischman started in Amsterdam but soon gave up again (he was, endearingly, a great punchcutter but a lousy businessman) was taken over by a certain Rudolph Wetstein from Basel and later sold, among other material, to Joh. I Enschedé; that marked the beginning of their typefounding activities in 1743. The foundry grew quickly and sold the work of great Dutch punchcutters for centuries: besides Fleischman (who returned to cut the bulk of his work for them), names like Van Dijck, Kis, Rosart, later Van Krimpen and De Does come to mind.

This design legacy is carried on today by the Enschedé Font Foundry; but the company archive is in the basement of Joh. Enschedé en Zonen, which now focuses on specialized security printing for stamps and banknotes. This means that the building is highly secured, visiting it is kind of a big deal, and cameras are not allowed inside. While the lack of visual documentation is sad, not having a lens in front of my face also made the experience deeper.

So in early March, we traveled to a heavily secured and otherwise nondescript factory building in an industrial zone in the outskirts of Haarlem, where rabbits run on deserted lawns behind an IKEA just off a major road. It felt pretty anticlimactic until we had met the curator, Johan de Zoete, traveled into the basement of the complex, and crossed the threshold into his treasure chamber. There it felt as if time itself was holding its breath. Breaking down, laying bare its contents for us to see. Letters from centuries. Rows and rows of books, journals, boxes with letters and objects. Posters and prints hung framed on the walls. We were told to stay together, to not touch anything. We behaved, but I wanted to touch everything. I wanted to live there.

We wandered through the centuries, and Mr de Zoete told us stories, showed photo albums, Daguerreotypes and paintings, bibles and books. And type. Type that showed off the limits of what Enschedé’s master craftsmen could do: beautifully floriated Didot capitals with hair-thin lines; a four-point bible type whose metal was thin and brittle and the letter faces barely visible even through a magnifying glass. We shuddered to think how long that would take to typeset … We turned a corner, and there was Paul Rädisch’s workbench: It looked as though Jan van Krimpen’s punchcutter had just gone out for coffee, “look, everything is the same”, said Mr de Zoete, pointing to a photograph of Rädisch sitting at that same desk, all the tools in the same arrangement, “only the candle has burned down a little more” he said, insisting it was the same one.

History really comes into life and into context when it can be experienced like this. For instance Fleischman’s famous music type: I had known it existed, I had seen samples, but now it was lying there, in use in a violin manual by Leopold Mozart. (The father of W. A. Mozart; I’ve loved the famous son’s work since my childhood piano-playing days.) Realizing that that had then been a contemporary use … it was odd; type ages so slowly, and I easily forget how old it is, that Fleischman died when W. A. Mozart was twelve. I stood lost in thought, and Fleischman looked out from a tiny painting in which he looked wise and less ugly than in the well-known engraving (I remember thinking he looked a bit like Kevin Spacey). Around the painting were displayed his punchcutting tools, and I wished I could deduce something more meaningful from staring at these than “omg Fleischman worked with these 250 years ago”, but even that was pretty impressive.

I could talk about banknotes, envelopes, vignettes, furniture and stamps and books, but I will just mention one more amazing thing: Smoke proofs. I had read that punchcutters, while working on a punch, would take smoke proofs to judge their work; this involved blackening the punch over a flame (hence the candle on Rädisch’s desk) and pressing it – perfectly vertical, aligned to a guide – onto a sheet of paper, where the soot would leave an impression. It’s a quick way to “preview” a lettershape in progress, but what I did not know was that this is probably the sharpest reproduction one can get of type; and that it keeps. We got to see some of Rädisch’s decades-old smoke proofs of one of Jan van Krimpen’s faces. The soot stood black on the page, perfectly black, perfectly sharp. I held my breath, again.

We bought books. We said goodbye, and on our way home took the above photo, staring into the evening sun. Then we carried our books to the train, and slowly returned to the year 2014.

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.

My happy little messy letterfilled corner of the world.

Every time I look back at this blog, two things hit me: (1) Whoa, it’s already been <number of weeks> since I’ve blogged huh where the hell has the time gone!? And (2) hm since then I’ve done and learned so much that I should write a book not a blog post. I won’t write a book.

It’s definitely getting busy here, and there is so much learning. Off the main stage of type, what feels like a big breakthrough right now is that I’m slowly getting my head around a more object-oriented approach to programming. I’ve been scripting for years (and happily), but between my self-taught JavaScript, ActionScript and PHP, I was stuck writing inefficient and poorly reusable spaghetti code. Years ago I used to say I code like I ski – it doesn’t look pretty, but I’m happy if it works, is approximately fast enough, and everything is still in one piece afterwards. Well, I’m learning to ride a jetski now. Our Python classes with Just van Rossum have been catalyzing a change of thinking into what feels like higher-level abstraction. I published my first little RoboFont extension last week (it makes test words), and have officially tasted blood. :) It feels like peeking over a ridge on a mountain hike and seeing a whole landscape unfold… With a scriptable type editor and this, the possibilities seem vast, and I’m beginning to feel the process as something fluid and malleable rather than something fixed, predefined and “correct” to follow. This is exciting. Code empowers, people. Thinking empowers.

These days, most of my time goes into the Revival project with Paul van der Laan; this is pretty complex and difficult (and probably my favorite project right now). Also here, I feel that I learn a lot not just about drawing letters, but also thinking about how to approach the whole thing, what to draw, and how to set up my process – in a project like this, it’s easy to get lost in details, in a deluge of data, and hard to keep on track. – The latter is sort of generally true because we’re doing a lot (not that I’m complaining), between having started my final stonecarving piece, sketching out a family of six broad-nib-based text fonts, drawing Greek… and with Erik van Blokland we’ve been TypeCooking – something I’ve done before, but now it counts, and it’s faster, and so much fun.

The longer I’m here, the less I regret not doing this earlier. When I applied to TypeMedia, I felt a little odd for doing so at the age of 34; it just happened that way, I studied late, came to type design late, then worked, etc.; back then I sort of wished I’d gotten into the groove more quickly. But why? I’m not really sure, and now that I’m here, it’s just all exactly good. This is not to say that doing this at a younger age (as most do – most of my classmates are between 25 and 30) is a bad idea. But everyone is obviously different, and personally I appreciate having a bit of experience under my belt that I can draw from, a bit more knowledge perhaps of myself too. And really, it’s not like I’m learning any less for starting off with more experience in some fields (and for the record, I have none in others).

Mostly I’m just very grateful to be here, to have gotten to a point where I could up and leave – and come delve into this letter wonderland we’re in, with this great little group of lettercrazed people from all over. And if the humor ever gets too immature for my ripe old age, I just try to tune out. ;)

Pakjesavond at Type & Media. Did I mention I really like this group?

Good night, current favorite place. Again.

Days just race past. Crawling out of bed, making coffee. Cycling to school. Unpacking my bags. Then, input. Output. Thinking. Drawing. Carving. Writing. Erasing. Critiquing. Researching. Looking, looking, looking. Check the watch. Eating. Laughing. Playing foosball. Check the watch, check the window. Once again it’s dark out, it’s light out, it’s raining, it’s autumn, it’s winter. Once again it’s night. – I’m beginning to sense that after this year, I’ll be digesting all the input for years to come. For now, it’s nearing constant overdose, and I love it.

My first carving

In addition to the classes we’ve had from the start, we got a few new ones after getting back from Belgium. We’ve started stonecarving with Françoise Berserik, who is brilliant and lovely in a no-bullshit kind of way. And I’m loving stonecarving. It’s one of the things I was most looking forward to learning, and I’m surprised that it actually doesn’t require wizard-level skills to get started, and that I don’t need to be in constant mortal fear of messing up. True, there’s no Cmd-Z and no Tipp-Ex for stone (Carv-Ex?), but if you know how, quite a few minor mess-ups can be remedied or at least concealed. (“Oh, you made a mistake! Very good, I will show you how to fix it.”) It’s also yet another new perspective on lettershapes, another medium that requires us to think about letters in a different way, and I like that.

Peter Verheul looking at contrast

The classic Dutch lettermaking tool par excellence, if you will, has been introduced by Peter Verheul. After practising some writing with the broad-nib pen (or rather, flat brush), we have started on the “contrast exercise” – we’re drawing a regular-contrast text face closely based on broad-nib ductus, and deducing a low-contrast and a high-contrast version from it. On top of being interesting and challenging, the critique sessions are among the funniest hours every week. I’m going all-out on trying to make a flowy, pen-informed face for once. It’s a fun challenge.

“Input… input…”

But tools and processes are never fixed, never given, we need to make our own, we need to think beyond, and design is also “the skill to kill darlings”, says Petr van Blokland; the brilliant designer/developer/thinker/maker is holding cross-disciplinary evening studio talks every other week; we’ve had one so far, in which we determined the (much too long) list of topics for this semester, and talked about the design process, coding and logic, books and history and the future, about running a studio and running scripts; planting all these little hooks in my mind that made me stop and think until things spilled over from my brain into the sketchbook, and I returned home close to midnight, feeling gloriously drunk from thought.

Attempting to sort Arabic typefaces along a text–display axis

And in the most recent new class, Peter Biľak is introducing us to Non-Latin type; so far we’ve looked at Greek and Arabic type trying to sketch Latin companions – which is amazingly hard. It takes a bit of mental acrobatics to analyze type designs in a script you can’t read; a bit like, I guess, trying to hear verbal inflections in foreign tongues; and I’m glad Peter will tell us more about ways to understand Non-Latin designs, and relate multi-script families. – We’re also preparing “mini talks” about subjects of our own choosing that may or may not end up having something to do with our graduation projects. Every time someone mentions graduation projects something in my head goes into shock. It feels like we’ve only just started.

It was quite a special instalment for me, as the entire TypeMedia class of 13/14 had been drafted as volunteers. I was part of the video team in charge of recording the presentations, but spent about as much time running around to fix last-minute issues – looking for microphones or people, passing on messages, copying files around, drawing signs to point out where coffee was served or type critiqued. And trying not to pass out (I was in somewhat shaky health). The multitude of interdependent tasks sometimes seemed so confusing on the ground that I – like everyone I spoke to – am very happy with how smooth the whole thing ended up going. My hat is off to Marina Chaccur for the organization! I was super excited to be part of the whole thing, except that I managed to lose my voice the day before the conference started (pro tip: this is not a good idea). If you met me there and I croaked/hissed at you, I’m officially sorry, and I hope you didn’t get a cold. I’m so glad I managed to stay tuned.

My typical perspective in the “B” track. Here’s Paul Dijstelberge speaking, James and Mark on video duty too

The first two days ran in two tracks; I was in the “B” room, which on Wednesday was dedicated to technology and on Thursday to language/history/education. To me, the level of interestingness both of the content and the speakers varied wildly on those two days. I didn’t see anything that really would have put me to sleep, though; and there were some real gems among these smaller talks on perhaps more niche topics. My favorite presentations were those that looked with precision, rich knowledge and perhaps a bit of wit at parts of the process (Frank Grießhammer on kerning, Erik van Blokland on the intricacies of digitization), at terminology (Craig Eliason on how the term “Humanist” ended up being applied to a now rather ubiquitous category of sansserifs), or at letterforms themselves (Peter Bain on Walter Käch’s lettering manual that shows roots of Univers and Helvetica; Paul Dijstelberge on early modern typefaces, looking at type history as shaped by technology). Much food for thought, as always. My least favorite talks were the ones that primarily seemed to serve the propagation of a specific company / service / institution / business model rather than furthering discourse, learning, and exchange. But there were not very many of those.

On Friday morning the main conference was kicked off on the big stage in the hotel’s Grand Ballroom. Presentations here only ran in one track; a slight, welcome reduction in input overload (as well as our workload). Petr van Blokland’s opening keynote was my personal highlight of the conference; looking out into the future of the design profession, it pre-empted many themes that would reverberate through the next conference days: the notion of design as high-level problem-solving; the need of designers to think in (and design) systems, rules, models, rather than single instances; coding as inherently a design technique.

Petr van Blokland on ideaspace vs. toolspace (illustration by Erik van Blokland)

Yet also in the main conference, there was still ample space for very specific, very informed research presentations: Fred Smeijers’ fascinating talk on the justification of 16th-century matrices was one of my favorites; a precise, captivating look at a part of the historical process that I previously knew very little about. Another highlight was a comprehensive look at the development of Microsoft’s new optically-sized screen font Sitka – a dialogue between typeface design and readability testing, presented, in turn, by way of a fine dialogue by Matthew Carter & Kevin Larson. Maybe inspired by the conference theme (“Point/Counterpoint”), quite a few presentations were delivered in dialogue – mostly to great effect. We got to meet Font Bureau’s magnificent duo, David Jonathan Ross & Cyrus Highsmith and their work (I’m a fan), and a couple of teams presented their projects together: Indra Kupferschmid & Nick Sherman on Type Record, Irma Boom & Paul van der Laan on the Rijksmuseum identity.

The liveliness with which these duos passed content (and mikes) back and forth deflated in the anemic panel on free/libre fonts comprising six figureheads and no critics. Their scripted-sounding exchange about the quantitative successes of Google Fonts et al seemed rather out of place in a conference so centered on learning from each other to further the craft; it felt a bit like an (uninspired) housewares sales event, and controversy was dodged even in the Q&A: “Yes, we could talk about business models all night. Now, does anyone have a question on … collaboration?” Nobody did, and we rushed off to drown our frustration at the apparent impossibility (or indesirability) of real dialogue between the libre types and the type scene proper in coffee and really good pastries. To me, the low point of the conference (not the pastries).

Just like the main conference had started on a somewhat visionary note with Petr’s keynote address, Nick Sherman concluded it with some big and to me, really exciting ideas. He defined the term “Responsive Typography” much larger than it is used in discourse these days. Why, he asked, should we limit ourselves to the idea of serving individualized fonts per browser/platform; why not serve one font file and be able to control it parametrically in the browser? The vision of an entire Noordzij cube in one font file, a parametric font – a nod more to Metafont than Multiple Master.

Speaking of which – Donald Knuth himself made an (apparently rare) appearance at this conference; his acceptance speech for the Dr. Peter Karow Award was humble and gracious, and actually brought a little tear to my eye. The other gracious old man honored at this conference was Gerrit Noordzij, who was awarded the TDC medal. And in him too: not a trace of the pompous self-importance that would for many others come automatically with his level of relevance.

The critical Type Crit jury: Christian Schwartz, Erik van Blokland, Gerry Leonidas; Jan Middendorp moderating

I did not get to see too many evening/side events, but one other thing I very much enjoyed was the first (quite lively) ATypI Type Crit session; I hope this will catch on and continue. As a side note, the conference bookstore operated by Nijhof & Lee was delightful and dangerous, perfectly tailored to ATypI’s somewhat academic typophile audience. But my most favorite thing outside the conference halls proper was the special exhibition put on by the Bijzondere Collecties UVA for their evening reception, and specifically the fact that it featured Bram de Does’ drawings for Lexicon, which are so beautiful they made me want to cry, or grin, or both. I admired them for a long time. “It’s not good for young designers to look at those”, Mathieu Lommen said to me; “don’t get discouraged.” And when I made some comment about Bram de Does never having designed type before and then going on to make two amazing classics: “Well, he spent twenty years looking. Really looking at type. Then he started to design.”

I hope I never stop looking, and learning. Thanks, ATypI. And “Gongratulations” on another great conference!

“Do not use this (make 1 unit narrower)”. From Bram de Does’ drawings for Lexicon

Toshi Omagari hovering over exhibits too

For one thing, I’ve been enjoying diving into Python for real. We’re working with DrawBot, an intuitive environment, discovering ways of building letters parametrically. This is, as James wrote, insanely fun. It’s sometimes also insanely hard. I’m currently trying to wrap my head around how curves work. I looked up how to mathematically deal with béziers and now I’m sorry I did (it’s a little daunting). I’ll start by reviewing the basics I review every time I have to script visual stuff … trigonometry breaks my brain every damn time. I don’t know why my brain has a selective incapacity for angles, I just can’t remember which function is which. Every time I have to apply a sine or a cosine or an arcsomething, things go … hell, I’d be happy if they went pear-shaped, right now this “o” looks like a melted Pacman.

When this grows up it will be a beautiful “o”.

But it’s challenging in a fun way, and I know I can solve this if I set my mind to it. Writing is harder for me (as in calligraphy, which they don’t call what we do here) – it requires humility and dexterity, not two of my greatest strengths, and practice, which I lack. I started typing an (unpublished, whiny) post two weeks ago, after our first broad-nib writing lesson in which I had entirely failed at making straight lines, never mind balanced curves.

I was hoping to be a bit more graceful about this but the truth so far has been, I suck at writing and calligraphy and it makes me angry at myself. And of course I’m in the lion’s den here at TypeMedia – and on purpose too –, so I was bound to hit this obstacle very soon. But admitting that I handle the tools clumsily, producing crooked results, is hard for someone who’s between Swiss and OCD in terms of wanting things regular and aligned, and expects a lot from herself. 

Since then I’ve learned that (a) it’s a little silly to get upset about being bad at something I haven’t practised before, and (b) the thing is to accept the “I don’t know shit” barrier, and then start working with the tools (from zero, if needs be) instead of against them (kind of like what Josh wrote this week as well). It’s hard to admit to being bad at things, not knowing how to do them; to check my ego at the door. But it’s necessary. Once I realized that I don’t have anything to prove, it was okay. Because the point is the path, the learning curve, and on that I have embarked. And I’m learning a lot and you know what? Learning, discovering new things, feels way better than the fearful “safety” of thinking I already know.

Hugo, David, Josh, Alex, James, and the original Kelmscott Chaucer edition.

These days at school are crazy and quiet and beautiful and rich and so full that there is almost nothing outside them, except maybe a beer and a dream in the night. I go to school at nine in the morning, get home about ten in the evening, they are lovely long days spent exploring the universe of lettershapes, letters drawn, written, coded, researched, discussed, searched, found. Hated. Loved.

Today, part of our day in the land of letters was an excursion into books: Jan Willem took us to Museum Meermanno. We got a first impression of the museum and its magnificent collection of historical (mostly early) printed books (the first one I saw exhibited just happened to be Aldus Manutius’ famous Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) as well as secondary literature and resources; and we were shown some of their treasures by their wonderful librarian. That such a fascinating resource should be a mere two blocks away from our school…! And we may well need it soon too, researching our revival typefaces.

We got a good look at Jan van Krimpen’s original drawings for Romulus today. The precision with which such production drawings were executed never fails to amaze me.

We got pretty excited.

Breathtaking lettering by Helmut Salden.

Slávka, Josh, James, Heidi, Mark, Alexandre, Hugo