Tag Archives: typography
Two new Romanian calligraphy fonts
Romanian calligraphy is a unique amalgam of Cyrillic, Blackletter, and Glagolitic influences on the Latin alphabet. Florinf over at Typophile is working on two nifty new faces, Arhaic Geo and Arhaic Cali, inspired by old Romanian calligraphic samples:
A Geometric Glagolitic Sans
Check out Kalin Varbanov‘s Glagolitic Alphabet Anatomy, a geometric, sans-serif re-imagining of Glagolitic, one of the oldest Slavic alphabets.
Periodic Table of Typefaces
What’s better than a Periodic Table of Europeans? Why, A Periodic Table of Typefaces, of course:
(Via Holly.)
All hail the Crossbar I
A comprehensive list of typographic conventions in comic books, including the Crossbar I rule:
An “I” with the crossbars on top and bottom is virtually only used for the personal pronoun, “I.” The only other allowable use of the “crossbar I” is in abbreviations. Any other instance of the letter should just be the vertical stroke version.
Until reading this I thought my own preference for the Crossbar I in these cases was some weird personality defect. Now I can fire my therapist and add OpenType ligatures for the Crossbar I to all my fonts instead.
Cyrillic gone wild! or at least gone all speculative-fiction.
Experiments in typographic alternate history have produced Елброкан (Ælbrocan), an excellent Cyrillic Fraktur by Guifa (inspired by the discussion about my very own Shark, wow) and Калоян (Kaloyan), an awesome Cyrillic Uncial. Move over, boring old Устав (Ustav).
Alphabet Soup ported to Inkscape/SVG
I got this email Tuesday from Joel Holdsworth, announcing that he had ported my Alphabet Soup pseudo-letter-generator from a bitmap to a vector model, and turned it into an Inkscape plug-in. He tells me that the extension will likely be included with Inkscape v0.47.
I cannot begin to express how phenomenally awesome this is. This is the kind of news that keeps me writing, and releasing, little free software projects. Six years ago I wrote Alphabet Soup as a little art project; it was fun. I released it under an open source license, and then never got around to improving it to output a vector format. Then somebody I’ve never met comes along, and not only improves it, but integrates it into a bigger free software project and it will soon be available to thousands of users in a greatly improved form.
You can pull the extension out of Inkscape’s SVN here. You’ll need these files:
share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.inx share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.py share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup_config.py share/extensions/alphabet_soup/*.svg
Thanks Joel. Thanks Inkscape. I’m feeling pretty damn freetarded right now, and it feels good.
Meek FM: typographic synthesizer
Internet, meet Spydentify
Spydentify is a new experiment/side project of mine. It fills a niche that I first identified over at the Typophile Type ID Board: people love looking a pictures and trying to figure out what’s in them. The site’s interface is designed to be as addictive as possible, with a neverending, rapid flow of interesting images, big, shiny buttons to click, and instant feedback on your actions. I’m going to add more ego-stroking, viral-spreading and moderation features soon.
The interface also follows the MVC pattern I laid out in this article. It uses one static HTML file, all dynamic data is loaded through XMLHTTPRequest (AJAX, for those of you who speak Web 2.0), and all HTML generation is done via JavaScript manipulation of the DOM. The backend uses Pylons, which gave me a chance to learn Pylons, Paste, Routes, SQLAlchemy, FormEncode, and Mako. And comments are rendered with my own PottyMouth.
I also designed the logo all by myself.
Breuckelen
First glimpse of my new font, “Breuckelen,” inspired by my time in New York this past summer:
