rileycran.bsky.social
Designer / Developer | I make fonts at Lettermatic | 🔠He/Him 🔤
Lettermatic.com
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Congrats Lee!
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Bill Atkinson invented Marching Ants.
www.folklore.org/MacPaint_Evo...
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Please enjoy this charming story of Bill being convinced to add rounded rectangles to the Macintosh graphics libraries.
Also please note that his process was documented with a Polaroid camera because the ‘screenshot’ had not yet been invented.
www.folklore.org/Round_Rects_...
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I’ve been shouting out the answers on those episodes!
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Do simulator games count, or is that not roleplay enough? As I understand it, Microsoft Flight Sim is considered a valid educational tool for folks wanting to get their pilots license, for example.
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I recommend this documentary on youtube, produced in the 1990s, featuring interviews with the staff who built the machine and its software. This seems to be the most official oral history of the project, if you can stand the outrageously 90s production quality. 😀
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg8u...
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Congratulations Kee!
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At Lettermatic we encourage slashed zeros quite often! Extremely helpful in alphanumeric strings where you can’t infer what glyph it is from context alone.
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This was absolutely fantastic! Thanks for making this.
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I sense it’s not as broadly known as it should be how many letters from the 20th century are lettering and not type. Designers reach for voices from history that they cannot find, because they were not a ‘font’ to begin with.
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You may enjoy the two volume series ‘Mr. Product’. 📚
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All the letters here (except the smallest body copy) are hand drawn. There’s a certain tone to advertising sans serif lettering from this period (like ‘Meadow Gold’) that is so hard to out one’s finger on.
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Proud of you, Jane!
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Thanks David! My Lettermatic colleague @danellecheney.bsky.social led the Swash aspect of the project and did a beautiful job as she always does!
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Beautiful!
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One way to visualize the importance of counterforms is a 'blur test.' Adrian Frutiger did tests like this in the 1970s when designing his eponymous typeface (originally for a French airport). See how one set of drawings is easier to distinguish, in these harsh conditions of blur?
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By drawing different counter shapes, I can make many letters appear without changing the positive shape at all. This is shown here to illustrate the importance of the counterforms, and how they impact our perception of letter shapes.
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Sorry this happened Mila!
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It turns out subtraction is the quickest way. It's relatively simple; subtracting these two negative 'counterforms' or 'counters' from our positive shape has made this an 's.' Our brain wants to see the 's' here, based on the previous reading we've done in our lives.
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Much of the challenge in typeface design involves counterforms, and an awareness of how they work across a typeface. Thanks for listening about how the counterforms were handled in Really Sans, and try it for yourself here!
lettermatic.com/fonts/really...
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Typography feels this way to me — there are things we find typographically pleasant, and we’re trying our best to document the complicated systems that produce those results.
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Music theory, in comparison, is a sprawling complicated system that seems to strive to document what we perceive to be beautiful, pleasant music.
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For instance, chess has relatively few rules (most of which are often explained in a single sitting), but chess players are still playing never-before-seen games 1500 years later.
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I sometimes wonder if there is an inverse relationship between the complexity of a system, and the perceived simplicity of the result.
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Typeface design strikes me as working this same way. We have an instinct to make the letters rationally similar, and develop a ‘simple system’ for how they are assembled. But we’ve learned over time that it takes a more complicated system to make a typeface feel ‘simple’ to read.
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Whereas we have learned that a ‘simple to perceive result’ on the web is actually achieved by a more complicated responsive system that changes the design based on screen size. This more complicated system gets us closer to a ‘simple to perceive result.’