Every alphabet or typeface I did from Hallmark on until the End of Analog was done in essentially the same way. First, the initial designing, maybe just vowels. The vowels appear the most and therefore contribute the most to the quality and personality of a font. I like to start with the capital I. It’s not too challenging and offers the designer instant reward and the encouragement to go on. After the vowels, I add an m and an n. Then I can start tracing long strings of letters to establish spacing, relative weight and proportional characteristics, etc. I always start with “minimum.” Myron’s word. The parade of verticals helps establish spacing and color. After that, it is page after page of tracing lettering strings, adding new characters and adjusting old ones the whole time.

Interesting… I’ve been yearning to design fonts for a while now, and I’ve used FontForge a little bit, but nothing’s happened. Time for that to change, I think. Mmm. I can’t wait till I can design books using my own typefaces. :) (Assuming said typefaces are any good, of course. But we’ll cross our fingers.)

Speaking of design, I just rediscovered f0nt.com, a site with Thai fonts. The SIPA collection is my favorite so far — not only do the fonts work in Photoshop and all, but they even have beautiful OpenType alternates. I’m in heaven. :)

I want to change that! While I obviously can’t change the books on the shelves, I can publish classics set attractively. The only hard part (right now, at least) is having enough control over the process to make them as cheap as possible. Lulu’s okay but it’s still more expensive than a traditional run would be (of 500+ copies or more, that is). And I’d like to be able to determine more of the factors that go into the book’s production — paper, binding, bookmark tassels, etc. But alas, for now ’tis not to be. Someday, I hope…

1. To actively develop my photography skills, I’m going to choose a weekly theme (which will end up as a set in Flickr) and make an effort to find photo opps that fit. Things like “hope,” “yellow,” and “triangle,” for example. This week the theme will be…hmm…”solitude.”

2. I’ve been wanting to work on my illustration skills for a while, and yet nothing’s been happening. (Other than the cover of A Christmas Carol.) Getting ideas for subject matter has been slow — mainly because I haven’t been actively looking — and so I’ve decided to start illustrating existing stories, as practice. I’ll most likely be working on scenes from the Chronicles of Narnia and other favorite children’s books.

3. Something else I’m really interested in is font design. Since FontLab et al. are rather expensive, if anything happens with this it’ll be via FontForge. FontForge has all the basic functionality to create fonts, albeit with a horrifically ugly interface. ~sigh~ But it’s the only way (unless I shell out hundreds of bucks for Fontographer or FontLab, but since I don’t know if I actually have any talent for font design, I’d better test the waters first :)). (Oh, check out a cool post by Raph Levien on Typophile. I don’t know if anything’s happened with this since then, however.

4. One of my main interests with fonts and typesetting is Unicode. Four and a half years ago I re-typeset Henry Sweet’s An Icelandic Primer using TeX and the Omega system, and it was blissfully fun (especially in getting Omega to display the Icelandic-specific characters properly). I miss it. This is one of the reasons why I want to typeset foreign language texts for Riverglen Press. I just need to start making more time for RGP work, rather than getting caught up in schoolwork and such. ;)

5. Keeping the Moleskine sketchbook in my pocket is working, I think. Today in class I pulled it out and doodled instead of, erm, taking notes. :) Having it more accessible — the weight in my pocket reminds me it’s there — will help me draw more. And design more.

Having said that, I’ve noticed in copyfitting Phantastes that it’s rather hard to copyfit fiction nicely. Dialogue’s the main culprit, I think. Regardless, though, the question now in my mind is this: does it matter? Are these rules there for a reason, or are they just tradition without much basis in aesthetic value? Are widows and orphans really that hard on the eyes? Are “rivers of white” after paragraphs a bad thing?

I’m not sure. The main question is whether these get in the way of reading, since readability is the main function of typography. I think the answer is clearly no. There are a few exceptions (if the small word is at the end of a page, it could easily get skipped as the reader moves on to the next page), but generally speaking they don’t get in the way.

Aesthetically? Possibly. But maybe not. I’m thinking about recopyfitting Phantastes. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll wait till the next book to try out these theories. :)

[tags]copyfitting[/tags]

Caveats: this probably isn’t a good way to typeset a long text (anything more than a couple of pages), since you have to freeze everything in PDF first. It’s doable, of course, but just a tad bit crazy. :)

It’s also not a particularly ideal way to include Arabic/Hebrew words within the flow of a paragraph (intermingled with English or another left-to-right language). Again, I think you could do it, but if you’re doing more than a few words, I’d suggest getting the Middle Eastern edition of InDesign.

Anyway, this is enough for me to do the bilingual Hebrew/English psalter. Mmm. :)

[tags]Hebrew, Arabic, InDesign, PDF[/tags]

In other news, I’ve been working on some art for New Symbols, a Mormon book project which will be published next spring. Here’s a sneak preview at some drafts:

Last night I started reading Donald Knuth’s Digital Typography. Fascinating book (I’m only 100 pages into it, but it’s got me hooked). I used to use TeX. In fact, the summer before my mission I used Omega (a Unicode-enabled TeX system) to typeset Henry Sweet’s An Icelandic Primer. It turned out decently well — especially considering that I’m not even embarrassed about it. :) (Often when I go back to my old work, it makes me blush. I’ve come a long way.)

The reason I don’t use TeX anymore, however (other than that I have InDesign), is that I don’t particularly like the font choices. Computer Modern is indelibly associated with math in my mind, and even if it weren’t, I still don’t like it that much. I’ve yet to see a decent TeX font. Give me a good Garamond! With decent fonts, I’d consider using TeX again — not for my normal projects (InDesign is treating me just fine), but for other stuff. Maybe one of these days I’ll design my own Garamond-esque font in METAFONT…

[tags]InDesign, Donald Knuth, Omega, Unicode, TeX[/tags]

Oh, one last thing. I was thinking about buying Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book online. Not anymore — it’s $90 used! Rats. I can’t find it cheaper than that anywhere. Oh well. At least I have Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style to keep me happy. I wonder why Tschichold is so expensive…

[tags]typography, Jan Tschichold[/tags]

It was different! I’d been using Panther on my Powerbook, so when it came up and had all the Unicode stuff sorted by category, I got goosebumps and started drooling uncontrollably. Then I saw the “By Radical” tab. If only I knew Chinese… But it gets better — they’ve added a Font Variation area at the bottom which shows you the selected character in all the fonts in which it appears. That’s cool. It means I can select a Thai character and instantly see which of my fonts support Thai. I love Macs! :)

[tags]TextMate, Lucida Grande, OS X, Tiger, Thai[/tags]

And on page 42, I came across this: “No typesetting software should be permitted to compress, expand or letterspace the text automatically and arbitrarily as a means of fitting the copy. Copyfitting problems should be solved by creative design, not fobbed off on the reader and the text nor cast like pearls before machines.” Them’s strong words, there. :) And I agree. Yesterday when I wrote that auto-PDF post, I originally was dead-set against it and was going to write about why human-crafted is better. But something got the better of me. That something is now gone (whatever it was), and I won’t be casting my lot with any automatically generated PDF crowd any time soon. Book design is an art.

[tags]books, typography, design, PDF[/tags]