Tag: typography

Game in a Font

World’s first video game in a font! You read that right! It’s a video game in a font! A font as in “Time New Roman”. The entire game is enclosed in fontemon.otf, no javascript, no html, all font. You can play it anywhere! Your word processor! Your image editor! Your code editor! Even works with syntax highlighting. All the places you should never play games, but now you can because no one will stop you!

How big of a game can you make in a font? Fontemon has

4696 individual frames
2782 frames in its longest path
131 branches from 43 distinct choices
314 sprites
1085 words of text
But, just how much content can you fit, if you push it to the limit?

Max: 2^16 frames (65536)
Max: Longest path ~3277 frames
Max: Branches are a bit more complicated.
Max: 2^16 (65536) sprites
Max: No specific limit on words, but other limits (frames, and sprites) apply
Of all of those, I really want to talk about #2 Max: Longest path ~3277 frames.
Every design decision I've made for this game:

How to draw the sprites
Which type of substitution to use (Ligature substitution)
How to handle branches (again, Ligature substitution)
was directly influenced by this limitation. In fact, of all of the limitations,
this is the rate-limiting step. Almost all optimizations I've done, have been to
push this number upwards.

Proofing Fonts

The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for 12% of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1111 letters. Letter frequencies have been calculated since at least the 9th century, and crop up in the most unexpected places: Etaoin Shrdlu, the leftmost rows of the Linotype keyboard, merits an entry in the OED. These values were calculated by computer scientist Peter Norvig, whose 2012 analysis measured a massive corpus containing more than 3.5 trillion letters. Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is 10x more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. 7 of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the 9 rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform

Helvetica Now

Helvetica Now is a new chapter in the story of perhaps the best-known typeface of all time. Available in 3 optical sizes-Micro, Text, and Display-every character in Helvetica Now has been redrawn and refit; with a variety of useful alternates added. It has everything we love about Helvetica and everything we need for typography today. This is not a revival. This is not a restoration. This is the typeface Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann would have designed back in 1957 if they had known about offset printing, small screens, browsers, digital design tools and UI designers.

Edge effects

The different shapes or letters were thus chosen for research purposes, the goal being to learn which ones produced the best “edge effects” for plants and wildlife on the ground. If the S shape allowed more efficient access to sunlight, in other words, well, then S shapes would be used in the future to help stimulate forest recovery due to their particular pattern of sunlight.

Font Detectives

What does international political corruption have to do with type design? Normally, nothing—but that’s little consolation for the former prime minister of Pakistan. When Nawaz Sharif and his family came under scrutiny earlier this year thanks to revelations in the Panama Papers, the smoking gun in the case was a font. The prime minister’s daughter, Maryam Sharif, provided an exculpatory document that had been typeset in Calibri—a Microsoft font that was only released for general distribution nearly a year after the document had allegedly been signed and dated.

Comic Sans

Yet despite the fact that Comic Sans is recommended for those with dyslexia, the gatekeepers of graphic-design decency routinely mock those who use it as artistically stunted and uneducated. It turns out the ongoing joke about the idiocy of Comic Sans is ableist. Microsoft font designer Vincent Connare created Comic Sans — based on the lettering by John Costanza in the comic book The Dark Knight Returns — to be used for speech bubbles in place of the unacceptably formal Times New Roman. The font was released in 1994. “Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program’s interface, the typeface used to communicate the message,” Connare says on his website. “The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.”

Medieval Fonts

Medieval script tells time, although usually not very precisely. Take for example the 3 major script families from the medieval period: Caroline minuscule, Pregothic script, and Littera textualis or Gothic script.

Despite the fact that these 3 families are relatively easy to distinguish and identify, they were used for extensive periods of time: Caroline from c. 800 to c. 1050, Pregothic from c. 1050 to c. 1250, and Gothic from c. 1250 to c. 1500. In other words, merely identifying the family of handwriting is not enough to pinpoint when precisely a book was made.

Zapf

If you know Zapf Chancery and Zapf Dingbats, you know the faintest shadow of the work of Hermann Zapf. If you know exquisite mid-century books printed in Palatino, you’re getting closer; I never did, having come of age with the brutish digitization of Palatino that shipped with my first laser printer (along with other notable Zapf faces such as Optima and Melior, both too subtle to survive the barbarity of toner at 300dpi.) People under the age of 50 likely know Zapf only as a typeface designer, and while a deeper study of his typefaces will lead to such treasures as Hunt Roman and Saphir, even this is only 50% the story. Zapf is a consummate calligrapher — he has been for 80 years — and he is about to share with the world 1 of his private treasures.