Collaborative Type Design Experiment

Please try to keep all the discussions in the main forums on topic! If you have anything else, related to fonts, you want to share, please post it here!
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Collaborative Type Design Experiment

Post by William »

Have you seen the collaborative methods whiteboard in an Adobe blog?

http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/20 ... cocom.html

http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/20 ... rd_is.html

I am thinking that it might be fun and an art experience to try designing some type collaboratively using the whiteboard in the http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/20 ... cocom.html page, then do a Print Screen to produce a bmp file, then import the bmp into FontCreator and produce a font.

Maybe a whole alphabet or maybe some fleurons, maybe both.

I am hoping to start drawing after I post this note.

There is a real-time chat facility on the page too.

William Overington

13 November 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

I am hoping to start another type design experiment at the whiteboard on the following page as soon as I have made this post.

http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/20 ... cocom.html

The first type design experiment used the Highlighter Pen Tool at a width of 1 unit and the type design experiment used the Highlighter Pen Tool at a width of 15 units.

I am thinking of using the Highlighter Pen Tool at a width of 10 units for the next experiment, at least to start.

Readers are welcome to join in and draw letters if they so wish, or may just observe if they prefer.

There appears possibly to be a "one person draws at a time" rule, as if one needs to have "the focus" to draw. So I will try to put down the Highlighter Pen Tool from time to time so that others can draw if they wish.

As well as the whiteboard there is a chat box on the page as well.

Hopefully the results can be captured as a print screen image and made into a font using FontCreator.

William Overington

14 November 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

I have now tried the experiment.

I have uploaded a print screen image of the result to the web.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cocomo42.bmp

I have tried a few tests with importing it into FontCreator. Increasing the threshold from 63 to 128 reduces the size of at least some of the letters and changes at least some letter shapes.

Some readers might like a copy of a pdf which I produced this morning using a picture which I drew on the whiteboard, saved as a print screen image as a bmp then imported into a desktop publishing package and then increased in size.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/rainbow.pdf

Viewing the pdf at 400% on screen shows an interesting pixelation effect with the way that the colours merge.

William Overington

14 November 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

I have now produced a font using the artwork in the cococmo42.bmp file.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/TRANS001.TTF

I named the font Transatlantic as it was made in England using artwork drawn from England on an experimental whiteboard on a computer thought to be in America.

There are 36 glyphs in the font as such, capital letters and some punctuation. The @ glyph contains the imported version of the artwork, though the unused surrounding contours from the print screen image have been removed.

William Overington

15 November 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

I have now produced a pdf using the font.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/t ... tic001.pdf

William Overington

15 November 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

I have tried another two rainbow pictures.

I drew the pictures smaller so that when a print screen image was made as a bmp and then the bmp was used enlarged in a pdf a greater enlargement would be needed, so the pixelation would be observable.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/pixelrainbow.pdf

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/a ... ainbow.pdf

William Overington

15 November 2007
Erwin Denissen
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 11108
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2002 12:41 am
Location: Bilthoven, The Netherlands
Contact:

Post by Erwin Denissen »

You are very creative. I don't think a lot of people will try to make a font out of the white board, but I'm sure you've enjoyed the type design experiment.
Erwin Denissen
High-Logic
Proven Font Technology
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

Thank you for your kind comments.

Yesterday evening I decided to try to draw the artwork for a font with as much precision as I was able to obtain using the present whiteboard. I used a black opaque pen at a width of 5 units.

I produced eight bmp files. I have added the times at which I saved them as that may be of interest as to the time taken for the experiment.

I used five guidelines, drawn using the Highlight Rectangle Tool. As there is, as far as I am aware, no way within the present whiteboard to copy and paste a set of such guidelines whilst retaining their relative positions, I needed to use and reuse the same set of guidelines. Thus the artwork is on a number of print screen images, occupying only a small part of each.

After about two hours on the project I decided to finish. Today the guidelines are gone.

However, this may not be a great problem as I had drawn the designs for all except the capitals and the numerals and so I only need two guidelines, namely baseline and capital height in order to produce a set of capitals and numerals. I am thinking that maybe I can draw lots of guidelines to start, make a print screen image and then within Paint compare the new guidelines with those from yesterday and then delete most of the new guidelines so that just two remain and then maybe move one of them slightly.

I have tried an experiment of importing cocomo51.bmp into FontCreator. I found that I needed to increase the threshold from the default value of 63 in order that the baseline is not included in the contours.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cocomo51.bmp 19:29

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cocomo52.bmp 19:42

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cocomo53.bmp 19:56

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cocomo54.bmp 20:11

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cocomo55.bmp 20:26

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cocomo56.bmp 20:37

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cocomo57.bmp 20:47

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/cocomo58.bmp 20:56

I found this to be an interesting experiment. I was able to use the same ascender for each of the lowercase letters which has an ascender, thereby keeping the serif at the top of the ascender consistent within the font.

Please note that the artwork includes a design for a .notdef glyph for the font.

William Overington

16 November 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

I have now used the artwork to produce a font and also a pdf using the font.

I started a new font and added eight glyphs at the end and then imported the eight bmp files using a threshold value of 200, one to each of the eight glyphs which had been added at the end.

I then copied the glyphs for the characters to their correct places, adjusting the vertical alignment in blocks for version 001. I then used Tools AutoMetrics... to get the glyphs correctly aligned at the left and with some white space at the right.

I then scaled all of the glyphs by 400% both horizontally and vertically about the point (0,0).

I altered the metrics and set the values for space and nonmarkingreturn.

For version 002 I deleted the eight glyphs at the end, altered the vertical position of some of the glyphs and added a kerning pair for the qu pair.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/WVENE002.TTF

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/wvene002.pdf

The text in the pdf was altered from the original a little as the font did not contain all of the capital letters needed for the original text.

William Overington

16 November 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

There are a few additional files now available.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/WVENE003.TTF

WVENE003.TTF Whiteboard Venetian 003 is made from a copy of version 002. The line below the serif on each of b, h, k and lowercase l has been removed.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/TRANS002.TTF

TRANS002.TTF Transatlantic 002 is made from a copy of version 001. There are now kerning pairs for AT, AV and VA. The @ glyph with the raw glyphs has been deleted.

There are also two pdfs.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/wvene002paper.pdf

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/locomotive.pdf

The font for producing the antique laid paper simulation is available from the following page, about two-thirds of the way down the page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/fonts.htm

The design for the locomotive is based on the locomotive shown in a feature of the following page, about a third of the way down the page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/library.htm

William Overington

17 November 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

Some readers may have read the following thread where I describe a problem which arose during the continuing story of the Whiteboard Venetian font, due to a mistake of my own in drawing some of the artwork.

viewtopic.php?t=1966

Anyway, I have persevered and, although the problems got worse I think that I have resolved most of them, though some of the capitals look a little heavy when seen in a block of capitals.

Here is the latest version of the font.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/WVENE007.TTF

There are now complete uppercase and lowercase for ordinary English words together with some punctuation, though there are no digits implemented.

William Overington

19 November 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

I experimented with adding the glyphs for some ligatures. These glyphs were constructed starting from copies of the existing glyphs rather than drawing more artwork.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/WVENE008.TTF

Here is a test of the ligatures.

  ff fi fl ffi ffl

Seven glyphs are shown. The first two are for the old Microsoft Private Use Area mappings and the other five are for the regular Unicode mappings.

If the Whiteboard Venetian 008 font is downloaded to local hard disc storage and then installed, copying and pasting the above seven glyphs into the Microsoft WordPad program and then formatting using the Whiteboard Venetian 008 font should cause the glyphs to be displayed.

William Overington

19 November 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

I have now produced Whiteboard Venetian version 0.08.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/WVENETIA.TTF

It is derived directly from the previously published Whiteboard Venetian 008 font. This process included deleting unused glyphs, setting the ranges for Unicode Character Ranges and Code Page Character Ranges and then validating.

The font has no digits. However, there are four smart quote glyphs. As well as the punctuation shown by the fontviewer for TrueType fonts there are an ampersand, a hyphen and an underscore. There are also Æ and þ characters. The font also has one kerning pair, namely qu.

Readers downloading and trying the font might like copies of the two test texts which I am using which can be copied and pasted into a text editor.

The is the Whiteboard Venetian font in action. It is made in the twenty-first Century yet its design is influenced by a design of the fifteenth Century. Please note the slanting dot on the i, slightly to the right. Please note the lower serif on the r, longer to the right. Please note the slanting line on the e, the design of the k, the design of the R.

It was sometime later that they arrived at the edge of the forest. They rode beneath the canopy of trees and their horses enjoyed the shade. After a while they decided to dismount to rest the horses and to walk for a while. They gazed at the huge trees and wondered how long they had taken to grow to this size. Could this forest have been planned by people or was it a natural phenomenon? After a while they remounted their horses and rode on at a steady pace. They talked of many things and sometimes they sang. Occasionally they rode for a while in silence. There was much about which to think. When they arrived at the town they would be asked for news of what was happening elsewhere. Yet mostly they would be asked to write documents! It was late in the afternoon when they left the forest. The edge of the forest was not a sudden event, it was gradual. Gradually the trees had become less dense, then there were few, and then there was open countryside.

William Overington

1 December 2007
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

I noticed this today.

http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/20 ... _beta.html

Please note the APPLY NOW section.

William Overington

5 December 2007
Post Reply