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

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

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.

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.