I just tried something and was surprised by the result. After learning this morning that I don’t actually buy books from Kindle, but lease them, I wanted to see what my options are if I actually buy an ePUB. More than that, as a font designer, I wanted to try an ePUB with embedded fonts. So, I simply exported an ePUB with embedded font from my KF8 version of the book and emailed it to myself. Then … Continue reading →
Revolutionary styles (to locate them by time) Modern: Bodoni Book These are type styles of the late 1700s and early 1800s, although their influence remains. To call them Modern, as most of the schools do, is silly. They are 200 years old. To call them Romantic (as Bringhurst does) is equally strange for they are cold fish. They are the natural expression of the radical, revolutionary intellectualism of the period. They are built with hard, tightly structured … Continue reading →
English Old Style: Caslon MyFonts puts it this way: “William Caslon released his first typefaces in 1722. Caslon’s types were based on seventeenth-century Dutch old style designs, which were then used extensively in England. Because of their remarkable practicality, Caslon’s designs met with instant success. Caslon’s types became popular throughout Europe and the American colonies; printer Benjamin Franklin hardly used any other typeface. “The first printings of the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were set … Continue reading →
By the 1600s, French oppression had caused the center of typography to shift to Antwerp primarily through Plantin who was based there. This style commercialized the French designs that were so heavily promoted by Plantin. The Dutch influence made the French work more printable, taking out some of the subtleties of Garamond and Granjon. Their main influence was in England where there was no real typefounding industry until Caslon in the 1700s. These styles were a abandonment … Continue reading →
As mentioned, Granjon was another of the new breed of professional punchcutters who developed type foundries in Paris in the early sixteenth century. I find Matthew Carter’s interpretation to be the best of the Garalde styles, but Hoefler makes it another classification (probably just to give himself an excuse to show this exquisite design in addition to the required Garamond). French Oldstyle characteristics Heavier Serifs becomes much stronger: more like supports than finishing strokes to a stem … Continue reading →
Garalde: Garamond 3 This group is named in homage to Claude Garamond and Aldus Manutius. These original serif fonts are exemplified by the work of Claude Garamond in Paris in the early to mid-1500s. Robert Slimbach released a new interpretation of Claude Garamond’s and Robert Granjon’s styles called Adobe Garamond Pro—now ramped up to Premier after redoing the OpenType version. Garamond was the first major type designer. He was not a printer or calligrapher, he was a freelance punchcutter. Along with … Continue reading →
Aldine: Bembo These fonts are also from Northern Italy. Bembo is a revival of the work of another printer, Aldus Manutius in the 1500s. Manutius was a major influence on type design as we know it. This continued the trend toward a more intellectual development of type away from its calligraphic roots. Aldine characteristics Narrower caps: But not by much Larger x-height: This tends to make these fonts look a bit more contemporary to our eyes. Ascenders … Continue reading →
Venetian: Adobe Jenson Pro Shortly after Gutenberg got things rolling in Germany a group of printers in Italy became interested in reviving some of the letterforms instituted by Charlemagne at the founding of the Holy Roman Empire in the 8th century. The creative innovation was provided by Nicholas Jenson in Venice who combined the inscriptional caps with the Carolingian miniscules without many of the cursive remains. The gorgeous result is what we now call caps and lowercase, … Continue reading →
Some glyph terminology First we better define glyph. To be honest, I’ve never gotten this straight. To me it is just another term for a character or letter. Technically, it is typespeak for variations of a character. An A, an A with a swash, A small cap A might be considered three glyphs of the letter A. In my font design books, a glyph has a separate design window for a character in a font. Before we … Continue reading →
OpenType Simplified In two words, it’s confusing. FontLab has good, professional tools for developing OpenType fonts—but it is certainly not simple or easy. Fontographer really does not deal well with OpenType at all. Having said that, if you have a feature file, you can use it in Fontographer 5.1. You link to it in the font info dialog box on the Encoding page. Fontographer will use that feature file to build your OpenType font when you generate … Continue reading →