Hasta La Ideas

Behold this “artist impression” by Benthem Crouwel Architects of the glass roof on a new bus station behind the Amsterdam Central Station, currently under construction. The vast, curved roof is adorned with the word AMSTERDAM in large red-with-orange letters.

Click images to enlarge.

Building commenced in April 2011. Today, in September 2012, the middle section of the roof is still missing, so all we can see is AM…RDAM. (The letters STE won’t be inserted until 2013, when construction of the underground North-South tram line at this location is expected to be finished.)

Being worrisome by nature, we typographers can’t help expressing some concerns: did the architects and roofers calculate everything exactly right? Will the missing letters fit into the remaining space? And did the roofers adhere to proper kerning specifications?

Fact: the word AMSTERDAM starts and ends with the letter combination AM.

The first worrisome fact: the space between the first A and M is five windows …

… but between the second A and M – oh, horror – it is only four.

AM 1: five windows (close-up)

AM 2: four windows (close-up)

In addition to this internal kerning error we must point to a possibly even more worrisome fact. The distance from the word AMS… to the left side of the roof is forty-nine windows …

… whereas to the right side of …DAM we count only forty-six. The word AMSTERDAM will therefore be out of center by a margin of one or two “window pixels”. Or even more so, because the first letter (A) is skewed on the left side while the last (M) has a straight edge. It would have been wise to leave more space, not less, at the right-hand side, for the word to be centered properly.

Oh, well.

Piet Schreuders is a designer, writer, and researcher, living and working in Amsterdam. He founded and publishes Furore magazine, the cat-fanzine De Poezenkrant and is author of “Lay In – Lay Out”, “The Beatles’ London”, “Paperbacks, USA”, and “The Paperback Art of James Avati”.

Criterion Collection releases new commentary to the 2010 documentary

For fans of Spalding Gray familiar with his monologues from films like “Swimming to Cambodia” (1987), directed by Jonathan Demme, or “Gray’s Anatomy” (1996), directed by Steven Soderbergh, “And Everything Is Going Fine” (also directed by Soderbergh in 2010) is somewhat of a departure from form. In an effort to create a more complete picture of who Gray was, Soderbergh pieced the documentary together entirely from Gray’s performances, interviews and candid moments. Because the very nature of the documentary demands it to be a series of segments that Soderbergh has strung together, don’t expect to ride through from start to finish on the steam of Gray’s signature rapturous, breathless delivery. Still, what Soderbergh’s documentary lacks in momentum it makes up for with its sensitive portrayal of a man possessed by the art of storytelling.

Gray described what he did onstage as “Using myself to play myself.” Equipped with only a spiral bound notebook to which he rarely referred and a glass of water from which he seldom drank, Gray enacted rich scenes and played multiple characters in rapid fire dialogue with one another and with himself. Soderbergh begins his documentary the way Gray began all his monologues, with footage of a man alone onstage in the quiet moments before he launches into an explosive performance. Criterion‘s recent release of the film includes writer Nell Casey‘s essay, which perfectly describes that scene.

“At first, we see only a wooden table and a chair on a stage. The scratchy video recording skips and jumps a bit, giving the viewer a hint of the history; this is raw footage shot in 1982. The happy murmur of the unseen audience suggests a large crowd is awaiting the performance. A man walks onstage—dressed plainly in a plaid shirt and jeans—and applause rises up. He puts a glass of water down on the table. He offers a quick, offhand thanks, as if he were slightly embarrassed to find himself there. He pulls a spiral notebook out from a drawer in the table. He places it in front of him, takes a sip of water, and looks skyward while summoning his thoughts. He looks out on his audience—now with an open, direct expression—and he begins to tell a story.”

In an event that a shocked many, Gray jumped off the Staten Island Ferry in 2004. Through Soderbergh’s loving autobiography we get a little closer to man who continually bore his soul onstage but nevertheless remained a mystery. Criterion’s release includes The Making of “And Everything is Going Fine,” as well as Casey’s essay and Gray’s very first hour-long monologue, “Sex and Death to the Age 14“. The new edition is available for $32 from Criterion Collection.

Just in time for Halloween, from the depths of the Android 4.0 laboratory emerges a frightening cross-breed creature called Roboto.

It was built from scratch and made specifically for high density displays. Google describes it has having a “dual nature. It has a mechanical skeleton and the forms are largely geometric. At the same time the font’s sweeping semi-circular curves give it a cheerful demeanor.” — GottaBeMobile

This is pure PR BS. I know it when I see it because I’ve had to write a few glowing descriptions about typefaces that don’t really glow.

Click to embiggen image.

I’m all for the strategy of developing a unique identity typeface, and I commend Google for employing type designers in house, but this is an unwieldy mishmash. Roboto indeed has a mixed heritage, but that mix doesn’t have anything to do with the gibberish from the press release. Its parents are a Grotesk sans (like a slightly condensed Helvetica) and a Humanist sans (like Frutiger or Myriad). There’s nothing wrong with combining elements of these two styles to create something new. The crime is in the way they were combined: grabbing ideas from the Grotesk model, along with a Univers-inspired ‘a’ and ‘G’, welding them to letters from the Humanist model, and then bolting on three straight-sided caps à la DIN.

When an alphabet has such unrelated glyphs it can taste completely different depending on the word. “Fudge” is casual and contemporary. “Marshmallow” is rigid and classical. This is not a typeface. It’s a tossed salad. Or a four-headed Frankenstein. You never know which personality you’ll get.

For now, I can only speculate on how this beast came to be. The font files credit the design to Christian Robertson, whom I know to be a very bright professional with some decent work under his belt, including the convincing handwriter Dear Sarah and the adorable Ubuntu Titling font. Either Google tied him down and made unreasonable demands or there’s something nasty in the water down in Mountain View. To be fair, I haven’t seen the fonts on a phone, in person, and Google promises that they are built specifically for that medium. But I can’t imagine that would erase the inherent problem with the design. There are some good shapes in Roboto, they just belong in multiple typefaces.

In any event, Roboto probably won’t terrorize mobile screens for very long. Helvetica and Frutiger are immortal. Hodgepodge brutes like these usually have a short lifespan.

Download the Roboto fonts
See Roboto in action
For a multi-class combo done right, see Fakt or Breuer Text.

Update: Robertson has replied with his rationale for the design:

Here’s the thinking with the open terminals on the ‘e’ and ‘g’. It has been the hard and fast rule for sans serif types that the a, c, e, g and s must agree as to their angle of exit. Interestingly, this is not the case for serif types, and certainly isn’t true for any kind of handwriting. It is common for the lower case ‘e’ to be more open than the ‘a’ for example. If there is a single story ‘g’ it will often remain open, or even curve back the other way (up until it forms a two story g).

As I experimented with this thinking I realized a couple of things:

1 / I have always hated the way Helvetica and all of her acolytes close the terminal on the ‘g’. It is just so awkward. You can’t do it with a pen; the terminal always wants to end somewhere other than straight up (note that this is not true of s or a). It’s like a ‘t’ or ‘f’ that hooks all the way around. It’s just gross. It’s even worse with the geometric bowl on top. You get such an awkward double curve. I equally hate any calligraphic ‘g’ that closes with a ball terminal.

2 / I discovered that the type with a closed ‘a’ and ‘s’ and an open ‘e’ and ‘g’ has a really beautiful texture across longer blocks of text. The rhythm has this kind of a swirl that is actually really nice to read. You are correct that Fudge and Marshmallow may initially disrupt some expectations, but over the course of actually using the font, you forget that ‘e’ is decreed to be closed like ‘a’ (it doesn’t want to be anyway and ‘g’ needs a friend). Despite the PR speak, the variation in exit vectors does make for a more cheerful type.

As for the other two monster heads, I’m ignoring the part about the straight sided caps, since I don’t find it a problem that the lower case aren’t equally straight sided. Also, I find your disagreement with the K hardly worthy of justifying another head; possibly a finger or toe.

Note that there are still some bugs in the font that has been extracted from the SDK. Many of these have been corrected already, and you can expect to see some fixes to minor kerning issues and some diacritical misalignments. Also, since Android doesn’t use much of the nastiness that is TrueType hinting, Roboto is not hinted to support older Windows browsers, for example.

Update: Jan. 12, 2012 — Google offers the full 16-font Roboto family and specimen book on their new Android Design site. (Thanks, Reed Reibstein.)

The rendering issue, at least at text sizes, is not going to go away anytime soon. As it’s been pointed out, the naivety of some designers, coupled with the marketing motivations of webfont services and distributors, does not bode well for the readership. The bandwagon has left, with everyone on board, but not realizing it’s missing a wheel.

[Editor’s note: Ross initially posted this text as a comment but I felt it required the space and prominence of a new post. — SC]

Some of the following simply reiterates what Stephen has already observed, but I think it is worth reinforcing from a slightly different perspective.

Firstly, let me address the statement:

Font buyers rely on providers more than ever before. Those who provide quality and transparency will lead this new market and medium.

I certainly hope this will be the case soon. Currently, providers use a few approaches to address the quality issue. One approach is to leave the optimization up to the foundry or licensing designer. This is obviously the least expensive and most profitable approach in the short term — profitable for the third party provider, that is, probably not for the smaller foundry. Another approach is to develop some sort of “autohinting”. From what I’ve seen this is at best a stopgap that provides somewhat adequate results some of the time, and would be what I consider only a first step, perhaps suitable for fonts that you knew were only being used at larger sizes, or as a basis for manual improvements. If I could generalize, the main point of weakness is that most automated routines only recognize obvious features of glyph anatomy (eg. stems, and to a lesser degree vertical alignments) but are mostly incapable of recognizing relationships, which is a core principal of TrueType hinting; the rasterizer has to be explicitly instructed that the counter of an ‘e’ shouldn’t collapse and should have white inside of it, unless told otherwise using Delta instructions. Autohinting can only say there is a top stroke, a middle stroke, and a bottom stroke, and that the top and bottom are in alignment zones. In fact, it doesn’t really know that the middle stroke is in the “middle”, it just knows its a stroke, and it doesn’t know anything about the relationship between the top and bottom. And so on.

I see some mention of rendering quality — how one provider’s approach bests their competition — but I see little actual sensitivity to the quality. For the provider’s own websites, where they can chose the best option (one would hope they would, at least), they chose fonts which are not optimized and have obvious, easily remedied issues. Not the best advertising, but at least its truthful, I suppose.

Even with those who really do know better, you see rather odd examples. Stephen pointed out Monotype’s FontsLive site, which doesn’t show examples below 24px (ppms?).

Webfont at FontsLive.com with ClearType rendering.

On this page they are promoting the quality of their webfonts, but if you look at the first ClearType example, it very much looks like it is not even hinted (vis. 36px and below). It doesn’t surprise me that it isn’t hinted, but that they are using it as an exemplar of their webfonts. This illustrates a couple of the issues I already mentioned: the “provider” is pushing a service without adequately addressing quality issues, which in turn aren’t seen as affordable to the original foundry because the original foundry’s/designer’s slice of the pie doesn’t warrant the expense. So the complaint that they are only showing larger samples is a valid one. It’s a bit of a snow job, but in this case they can’t even pull that off because the problems manifest themselves even at display/headline sizes. (The second Copperplate example has the same problems.) Fortunately, their collection of fonts for text are well chosen because they are well hinted, but the distinction can be blurred, especially in cases where something that could be a “text” font is categorized as “headline” because its unhinted.

So now we have webfonts, and they’re spilling out into the wild faster than they really should. Well, actually, they aren’t really all webfonts, they’re just marketed as such. What are the discussions about quality taking place in foundries, distributors, and third party providers? What steps are they taking towards addressing the quality issues? Do they care? The one positive thing with webfont services is that the fonts are served, rather then installed, and so when a better quality version becomes available there isn’t some onerous install and upgrade procedure to deal with.

It also doesn’t help to skirt the issue by placing blame, or making excuses or predictions that are not demonstrably accurate. Saying its Microsoft’s fault because their rendering is “crappy” is specious. The (TrueType) rendering is fine, as long as the (TrueType) font has a suitable level of instructions. There are more fundamental reasons why MS have chosen to retain this relationship between the rasterizer and the font, some of which has to do with the global nature of their market. Whether or not Windows rendering is better then OSX rendering can be debated subjectively. This debate has no affect on the existing and near-future market that the font and design industries have to serve, where actual OS proportions should rule the decision-making process. Windows XP may well be anachronistic, but it so happens over 50% of users happen also to be anachronistic, and an additional 40% of people are using other flavors of “crappy” rendering systems. That’s approximately 90+% of users out there using “crappy” “anachronistic” software, and as suppliers of content to those systems we have to do the best we can.

The same goes for the argument that in a couple of years we will all have 300ppi screens. Well, maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it. We will have more high resolution devices (mostly mobile devices), but again we are looking at the bigger picture when producing content for the web. I won’t go into it in great detail, but it is considerably more difficult to manufacture say, a screen that is 70 square inches (such as a laptop) then it is to manufacture a screen that is 5 square inches (such as the iPhone). Manufacturers have to be able to produce volumes of screens at an attrition rate that does not impact efficiency (ie. if you have to chuck half the panels because they have dead pixels, it doesn’t make financial sense). This end of the industry doesn’t seem to move nearly as fast as the other components. Screen resolution has been nearly fixed for the last decade, with most devices hovering around the 100ppi mark (+/-10ppi). So this argument is fine, if you don’t mind not releasing any webfonts for the next 10 years (or however long it will take for high-res screens to be the norm) — otherwise you’re not really doing any good to our end customer’s experience.

Which brings us to the solution end of things.

I don’t think foundries realize yet the “damage” they’ve done by saturating the market with libraries full of fonts not-yet-ready-for-screen. […] But nonetheless, type-designers, get busy with it! — Angus Shamal

Right. Easier said than done. There are only a handful of people on the planet who do TrueType hinting professionally. FontLab certainly has the basic tools available, if you know how to use them or are willing to learn. So that’s one hurdle. The other is time and/or money. Hiring a third party to do your hinting is an option if you can find someone with the time and if you can afford it. It is highly specialized and is priced accordingly. But the more basic issue — regardless of the form of the investment in hinting — is whether that investment translates to a reasonable return for the originating foundry or designer after all the distributors and “providers” have taken their cut. It seems to me a more coordinated effort may be a better option and that all parties involved carefully consider the quality of the product being released, and collectively find a solution to deal with the issue.

Ross Mills is a type designer and co-founder of Tiro Typeworks. He has been involved in the design and production of multilingual and specialist typefaces for Microsoft Corp., Linotype Library, Apple Computer, the Government of Nunavut and others.

Being one of the rare type designers who happen to be female, I occasionally get this question from other (mostly male) designers. It’s difficult to find other female designers with whom to exchange experiences and share knowledge.

The most common explanation is that type design is a “technical” profession. This is rubbish. Yes, font production does involve some programming, but, as a whole, doesn’t type design have much more to do with the patience required by classic female handcrafts, like needlework and knitting?

My guess is that the real answer is found in gender-specific socialization, both in general society and in the type design scene itself.

In Germany, women and men are still not treated equally. Young boys are rewarded much earlier in life, and for much less, than most young girls. Being born as a boy — and therefore a son and heir — is for many parents an achievement in itself. They project this sense of worth on their son. Everybody is already proud of him, by default.

As a daughter, you have to prove that you deserve being rewarded. Yet even a concerted effort may not lead to a positive reaction from adults. The girl also isn’t worthy of the same support because she won’t carry the family’s name.

Looking at type design as a working process, you must eventually decide when the typeface is finished. For most designers it’s difficult to find an end and be satisfied with the result. Then you add the expectations of others, amplified by the gender gap. Women constantly think they could do better. It’s never enough, they could get judged, they have to please, etc.

There are many of women who have great type designs tucked away in their drawers. They don’t dare to show them to the public.

The same is with women on the stages of type conferences. For most guys, public speaking is less of a problem. They are used to show off with every little bit they produced, knowing they will get rewarded — and if not, well, it’s no big deal.

I have the impression that this imbalance in our upbringing is stronger in Germany than elsewhere in the Western world. It could be one reason why some great female designers with German or Swiss roots had to get out and become successful abroad.

Another aspect is networking, which is still a male thing, and which women typically aren’t taught. They tend to be solitary fighters, which of course has a negative effect on their careers.

Later, if that career does progress, our social structure simply makes it very difficult for women to combine the time working on a typeface with having a family, given the mother’s traditional role as primary caregiver. You find a lot of over-qualified female designers doing production for type foundries, which gives them a financial security in their beloved profession.

One more sad truth: as a lesser known woman, the (male) type scene just doesn’t take you seriously. You are just a “student” who fancies the cool “boys”. You can sit down and listen to them, but you won’t be asked to give your opinion on “serious” type issues. This attitude may seem prehistoric, but honestly, I’ve heard it often.

The solution? Women should be aware of self-censorship, be less hard on themselves, and continue to maintain a high standard of quality without hiding in their chambers. (And some guys shouldn’t jump on stage at the drop of a hat. These changes alone would enhance the quality of some type events.)

I had to do this too. I pushed myself to give lectures and presentations and face the reaction of other type designers. And now, I like it a lot.

Verena Gerlach was born in Berlin and studied Visual Communication at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee. Shortly after finishing art school in 1998, she founded her own studio (fraugerlach) for graphic design, type design and typography. Gerlach has lectured in type design and typography at designakademie berlin from 2003–2009 and gives lectures and workshops about type- and graphic design all over the globe.