Quality Assurance (QA) of fonts is an increasing requirement for type designers, foundries, and font distributors. During the QA process, everyone has their workflows to help ensure that their fonts are in good condition. But all too often, they are fragmented and run on individual font files rather than on overall projects or may ignore… Continue reading Font Bakery: Automated Quality Assurance Checks for Fonts
If Gerrit Noordzij was correct that the foundation of type design is in writing, then the vast majority of the typographic shapes must consist of the strokes. Noordzij has proposed an evaluation concept of typographic forms through stroke forms based on translation, expansion, and rotation. The concept is visualized in the Cubic diagram. Nonetheless, this… Continue reading Beyond the Stroke
Typography education sits in a delicate balance between teaching historical precedent and contemporary practices while anticipating the potential futures of the discipline. Over the past twenty years, many typography curriculums have evolved to incorporate web fonts, interaction design, and animation. A new crop of prototyping tools, such as Figma, Webflow, and ReadyMag, offer more typographic… Continue reading A Balancing Act: Typography, Technologies, and Education
Hibizcus is a suite of free and open-source font proofing and debugging tools for South Asian and South East Asian languages. Most of the languages in these regions are written in a script that belongs to the Brahmic family, in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as a unit. This differs from a complete alphabetic script… Continue reading Proofing and Debugging Fonts with Hibizcus
Over the years, the OpenType specification has been improved and allows us to make advanced fonts. There are many benefits to all these new additions, like OpenType layout features, color, and support for variation, but this also makes it harder to spot problems. Many fonts contain issues; most of them are harmless, like incorrect Panose… Continue reading Polish Variable Fonts
Content is the king in the web world, and he’s wearing typography. And actually, from 2008—with Safari’s support for TrueType files—he can wear non-system fonts. But even after fourteen years, some insights into web typography are still pretty unknown for many people working with this medium: type designers, UI designers, and web developers. This talk… Continue reading Web Typesetting for a Digital World
Designing typefaces for hanzi (Chinese characters) has long been a problem because of the script’s tremendous character set and the complicated construction of individual characters. Hence efforts to automate the designing of glyphs have been around for decades. This presentation is about why, what, and how to generate hanzi glyphs automatically. The old parametric genre… Continue reading Computing the Shapes: Parametric Fonts and a Hanzi AI
Everyone knows that the computer language of choice for font engineering is Python. But Python is slow, and fonts are getting more complex. Simon Cozens has been working on a new set of font libraries and command line tools in a language called Rust, and they’re faster. Much faster. In this session, Cozens will talk… Continue reading Rusty Tools and Chains
Enricovar is a typeface developing the character set Latin-MX from documental research seeking coverage for the more than sixty Mexican native mother indigenous languages, including those with highly complex tonal voices. The basic idea behind the Enricovar project is to pursue the preservation of cultural diversity. The project includes a GitHub repository, a mapping character… Continue reading Enricovar: A Typeface for Mexican Mother Indigenous Languages
It’s not TEXT but TEXTURE! Explore a special brand design created by a typeface designer.