Typographer mentions that Inkscape, an open source vector editing application, will be supporting an really nifty curve drawing library called Spiro. This library was created specifically for typeface design, and the demo is impressive:

It’s not in the latest stable release, so I’m gonna wait abit before playing with it. Spiro’s creator has a Carbon app on his site for playing around with the library, but either I’m an idiot or it doesn’t work properly.

Not only are these custom guitar beautiful, the photography on this website is stunning.

I didn’t realize this until two days ago, but Firefox 3 supports auto kerning and ligatures. I happened upon a blog set in Hoefler Text and to my amazement, the text was set with all the classic fi and fl ligatures. Unfortunately the most used fonts on the web (Times New Roman, Arial, Georgia, Verdana) don’t have this stuff built in. It works great with the ClearType faces and any decent adobe OpenType faces. Adobe Jenson Pro looks marvelous.  My test page is here, if you have any of the requisite fonts on your local machine and are using FF3 you’ll be able to see what I’m talking about.

I threw a bunch of typefaces together in Illustrator to see how the letterforms work together. Mainly, I wanted to compare each one against Georgia to get some insight on how web-friendly letterforms are distinct from print faces. Interesting that the g and a seem to be the most varied (which they are of course known for, but it’s cool to see it in action).

Guilty parties involved: Times New Roman, Georgia, Adobe Caslon Pro, Garamond Premium pro, Palatino, Minion Pro. In no particular order.

Looks like somebodys figured out a very elegant way to create custon high-quality typography online, without sacrificing usability (text acts like text, not like a flash movie). Color me impressed! I might experiment with this here on the blog. It would be nice to have my titles in Adobe Jenson Pro or some other nice venetian.

I wonder what it would take to get this sucker running on the iLiad?

Engadget are talking about a new model (or two) of the Amazon Kindle in the works. I’m very curious to see how it will differ from the current one—what stays, what gets tossed, what gets added.

I forget if I stumbled upon this or if somebody told me about it, but Typetester is a nifty website where you can compare typefaces to se how they display on the web. Sure, it’s nothing you couldn’t set up yourself in Photoshop in 10 minutes, but it’s a nice service (and not everyone has Photoshop). I lined up Calibri and Corbel against Verdana (shrunk by 0.1em for fairness, since Verdana and Georgia are both large for their point size). I think I like them a bit better—even on my Mac (yeah yeah, horribly blurry anti-aliasing, whatever) where they don’t benefit from ClearType rendering they seem cleaner, a bit more civilized. Similar results comparing Georgia with Cambria and Corbel.

Iiiiiiiiiinteresting… *strokes beard thoughtfully*

Constantia and Cambria probably need to be a bit bigger to render nicely. Calibri maintains its poise well. I suspect more of Calibri’s clarity comes from the letterforms, whereas the others rely more on hinting (which is canceled out by the e-ink).

Here’s what Calibri looks like on the Kindle:

(click for full size)

More ClearType specimens to come…

I’m curiuos how friendly or harmful the process of making epaper is for the environment. Does the paper-saving aspect balance out the resource consumption and pollution that are part of the manufacture process? I’d be intereswted to know if there are any impartial stats on this.

Jeff Gomez has been chronicling his experience with the Kindle on his blog, and one thing he mentioned caught my attention:

One thing that I don’t mind about the Kindle is that it’s an extra device. I used to think that I wanted an integrated device — one thing that did everything — and that I wouldn’t want to carry around yet another device or gadget. But I actually like the fact that the Kindle is (more or less) just a device for the reading of content. Maybe this harkens back to the fact that every book is a destination; you get into bed and pick up a book because you want to read. You don’t pick up a book to take pictures, record video or get your voicemail. So the fact that I don’t use the Kindle to play solitaire is fine with me. True, that means I can’t read something if I leave the house and have just my cell phone in my back pocket. But then again, a cell phone screen is too small, and most books are too big, so carrying a Kindle seems the right compromise.

This reminded me of the theories about “sleep hygiene”. It’s recommended that you don’t do anything aside from sleeping (and the Boinky Thing if you’re lucky) in bed. No homework, no taxes, no TV watching. Psychologically, if the bed becomes associated with things other than sleep (especially work), you’re less likely to get decent rest. I’ll bet something similar applies to reading. If you use a device for reading, and only reading, might it not make the experience more pleasurable than reading on your computer screen, which you associate with work? Daily Lit, for example, sends you chapters to read by email, but reading an email is not necessarily something you associate with pleasure. Email, your browser/mail client, the computer itself, are all part of the work environment. Leisure activity involves an escape from work, and physical separation surely reinforces the feeling being at play, and not work.

Things get tricky when you consider books you don’t read for fun. Your iLiad or Sony reader may have your favorite Vernor Vinge and Isaac Asimov, but also some O’Reilly php books and some technical PDFs from the office. What does this do to your reading experience, when your device isn’t “sanctified” for leisure reading? Then consider using these devices as web browsers and email reader. At the moment, I doubt most people are willing to have separate e-readers for leisure reading and work material (okay, maybe Woz would have a bookshelf full of iLiads, but not the rest of us mortals). Maybe someday when (and if) epaper devices become cheaper and more ubiquitous, this could be more feasible. It fits with the current predictions of magazine and news people on how you’d use epaper.

Bill Hill alerted me to this interesting development: Esquire are going with an e-paper cover for their October issue. Great way to get some displays for real cheap! Sure, the kindle did a lot for e-paper’s visibility, but now the price of entry is a mere…um…whatever Esquire costs, which I’m guessing is a bit less than $350. If this was Wired doing it instead of Esquire, they’d be including a more easily hackable controller. But it ain’t. So we’ll just have to figure this one out. By which I mean, of course, wait for some clever soul to figure out how to hack it and then post the HOWTO online.

As promised, I have some results to share from my homebrew Kindle experiments.  Here’s an uploaded file where three blocks of text were input as an image, and the last bit as regular text and hence rendered in the Kindle’s default tyeface.  Scanned at 720ppi, shown here at 300ppi.

And a 720ppi comparison:

While the default Kindle text is blacker, it’s not much better (if at all) in terms of anti-aliasing and elegance.  Georgia expecially looks nice here, IMO.  Minion’s nice as well, but a bit thin.

I’m playing around with the Kindle, seeing what can be done by feeding it PDF files of different sorts.  Text as outlines, text as bitmaps, that sort of thing.  I’d uploaded some articles that were scanned from print sources, and some of the texts looked better than the default typeface that the Kindle uses.  I’m hoping this might shed some light on the workings of the text rasterizer.  Might be easier just to ask somebody at Amazon…

As part of my research I’m looking at how various speculative fiction authors and futurists have imagined the evolution of print media. It seems only fitting to start with Isaac Asimov. In the book Prelude to Foundation, the Good Doctor describes a religious text which shows many characteristics of epaper. The volume looks like a book of blank pages, which at the flip of an activation switch become covered in slow-scrolling print. Apparently each page can store a limited amount of text, and when it scrolls down to its limit it resets (scrolling speed is adjustable). About the odd combination of old and new, the protagonist says of the books makers: “The Mycogenians are stubbornly primitivistic, but not entirely so. They will keep to the essence of the primitive, but have no objection to using modern technology to modify it for convenience’s sake. Who knows?”  Read on for the excerpt after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

I saw this on Jeff Gomez’s blog, it cracked me up.

Warning: not safe for work; Lynch has a potty-mouth.

I’m reading a very insightful book by Jeff Gomez called Print is Dead: Books in our Digital Age.  Jeff has some very good answers to most of the anti-ebook rhetoric that’s been flying around the past few years.  He’s done his homework and can back up his claims with relevant research and stats.  He also keeps a nice blog that continues his thoughts about the future of books ad reading, as well as related news stories.

I’ve been spending some time with my Aunt and Uncle in Charlottesville VA.  In a small downtown bookstore, I found a first US edition copy of Walter Tracy’s “Letters of Credit: A View of Type Design”.  I couldn’t find this book in NYC, and it turns up here.  funny how these things go.

The book itself is delightful, very English and very opinionated about type, type designers, their triumphs and especially their failings.  Tracy obviously had some fun writing this volume.  It’s been cited extensively in a lot of the other texts I’ve been reading, so apparently his opinions hold some currency with other typographers.

You’re hardly a graphic designer if you don’t post examples of bad design on your blog every now and then.  However, evey now and again you seee some totally unexpected good design—such as this mysteriously well-typeset no tresspassing sign I’ve encountered in various spots in Manhattan.  This specific one was somewhere on East 13th street near Union Square.  I guess the person doing the signs for the Manhattan DA’s Office has InDesign…

I Picked it up at Strand Books today.  I was actually hunting for Letters of Credit by Walter Tracy, and instead walked out with the catalog, a Rocky & Bullwinkle book (alas, no hushaboom formula!), some 50s clip-art volumes and Lynd Ward’s woodcut novel God’s Man.  Anyway, this catalog is fantastic.  You know those fancy logos companies used to have, complete with an engraving of their company headquarters?  Michael Bierut complains about them in Helvetica.  Well, the Sears catalog has one for every…single…department.  All Amazingly executed, of course.  The reprint was published and copyright 1963, but I’m not sure if that means the illustrations inside count as public domain or not.  I sure hope so, it’s the best victorian clipart book ever!

I put together a lovely specimen sheet to test out on the Kindle.  Ben Bacon lent me his device today, with the PDF uploaded and ready to rock.  Imagine my dismay when I load the file, and all the text is in PMN Caecilia!  I had samples of Georgia, Verdana, Garamond, Jenson, Brush Script MT, all the ClearView typefaces…and the damn Kindle over-rode ‘em all.  Seems that when confronted with text input, the Kindle ignores whatever type you feed it.  This makes it a poor platform for exploring type rasterization, since you can’t do any sort of comparative work.

I worked with what I had, trying both photographing the device and scanning it at 9600 dpi.  Unfortunately, since the screen isn’t flush with the surface of the device, the real close-up scans just didn’t have the depth of field to remain focused.  Here are some details I picked out (clikc on an image to see it full-sized):

The infamous Lorem Ipsum

Jeff Bezos’s signature

Screensaver portrait of Charlotte Brönte

And one from a photo I took with a Nikon D-80:

You can see how “salty” the display is.  Also, it certainly looks like the screen’s smallest pixel size is much larger than a single microcapsule.

What I was really hoping for was something more like this:

(images taken from Molecular Machines web page)

In order to have some images like this to work with, I either need to get into a lab with a high-powered microscope, or convince the Molecular Machines group at the MIT Media Lab to give me some of their materials.  To that end I’ll be trying to contact the principal investigator.

A nice little parody of free font sites.  I had me a chuckle.

This is so old-school, I love it!

Lord knows if any of these people will write me back, but they’re at the source for most of what I’m doing.  I’d be curious to talk to people from Motorola about the Motofone, which uses e-ink, and I know the school has ties to Nokia people and maybe they’re looking into this stuff as well.

Matthew Carter: designed Georgia, Verdana and Tahoma.

Bill Hill: Former journalist and current Microsoft employee, worked on eBooks, ClearType, and IE8, big believer in screen readability.

Kevin Larson: part of the Advanced Reading Technologies team at Microsoft.

Leslie Cabarga: Wrote the bible on Logo, Font and Lettering design.

Thomas Rickner: did work for Apple on original TrueType, did the hinting for Georgia, Verdana and Tahoma.

Steven R. Matteson: Founding Partner of Ascender, involved in Cambria, Andale Mono and Droid.

Eric Kindel: Expert on Stencil Typography.

John Hudson: Designed Constantia for the M$ ClearType Font Collection.

Joseph Jacobson: MIT MEdial Lab professor, founded the E-Ink corporation.

Punk Robots, anyone?

In my search for info about the Kindle’s default typeface, I came across this little tirade.  From the Comments:

I have earned my living making books for 40 years. I started by hand-setting metal type, moved on to machine-set metal type, then to printing books letterpress. Then to proofreading, copy editing, designing books, typesetting on a computer, managing book production.

I do not like gadgets: no iPod, no blackberry, no cell phone, hell, not even a microwave oven.

I’m exactly the sort of person the world expects to share Kidd’s opposition to electronic readers.

Plus: I have been an avid reader of books for, oh, 58 years.

I eagerly await that day there’s a really good electronic device with a vast library of text available, that is well designed, that has a good feel in the hand, that has a good screen, and (since I’m a typographer) that has a good choice of typefaces. & is not too expensive.

I’m not seeing it yet. Will I see it in my lifetime? Probably. I hope so. It remains to be seen if I’ll be able to overcome my gadget aversion and to expand my love of printed books to include this device.

But I’m eager and I’m hopeful. Bring it on!

There is no graphic design opportunity, partly because the Kindle’s first release has one typeface, one leading, one layout. I’ve seen people looking at ragged right type, but it was justified with oceans of white space between words in everything I viewed.

“PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN.”

You hope.

Unless you’re a book designer, I’m not sure you really care about the typeface of the book you’re reading unless it somehow interferes with your, y’know, reading. I don’t, anyway. All this anti-Kindle book fetishism is bewildering to me. I love papercuts and cardboard boxes full of old paperbacks as much as anybody, but I can’t wait to try this thing. Having the amazingly deep backlist of somebody like Donald Westlake right at my fingertips, for example, that’s just amazing to me.

The Kindle is back-ordered until after Christmas, presumably because nobody wants to read books on a screen. Well, here’s a FAQ for anybody who’s on the fence…

The reason book designers care about the typeface is because they know it affects the reading experience.  Duh.  If you were a book designer you’d know that.

It’s getting tiring and annoying to refute all the misinformation about the Kindle, an imperfect 1st gen product but a ground-breaking, remarkable, undeniably useful product. Too many of the people criticizing the Kindle have never touched one and/or aren’t avid book readers.

If you like to read lengthy hardcover books, the Kindle offers many advantages (weight savings, cost savings, acquisition time savings). If you want to follow up references in a book to get more info online, without even getting up off the couch, Kindle is cool. If you want to take notes and flag passages in a book in a file that you can actually move onto your computer and reference later, Kindle works great. If you want to carry the book store with you wherever you go, go with Kindle. If you want an ebook device that fades into the background as you read for hours and become engrossed in the story, Kindle is your man.

On the other hand, if it’s actually the typeface that makes Moby Dick or Pride and Prejudice or The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay so good, the Kindle is not for you.

No, shit-wit.  It’s not the typeface that makes them great.  It’s the typeface that makes it more enjoyable to read great works.  Or it’s the typeface (when it’s the wrong one for the job) that turns you off and you end up missing out on great literature because reading it gave you migraines.

More kindle-grumbling here:

5) Another negative: I miss book design. I like the work of typographers and cover artists and the other people involved in how commercial books look. On the Kindle, everything appears in the same typeface; covers are often reproduced poorly. This uniformity could become a bit boring over time. My guess, however, is as the technology improves, so will the publishers’ ability to present the texts as they would like.

This Kindle review has some telling info:

All published content appears in a modern serif font called Linotype Caecilia. System menus and message are in Sans-Serif Helvetica. The books don’t seem to use the publisher/author-specified fonts or typefaces and always appear in Caecilia. I purchased A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink, and an example in the book asks the reader to identify, Times New Roman, Arial and Courier. On the Kindle, all appear in exactly the same Caecilia type.

Until the next time I can get my hands on an eBook reader, which I can subject to some hi-res scanning, there is this photo showing some pretty good detail of a Kindle screen.  The post this comes from has a lot of interesting observations about the Kindle.  The author claims the font used is PMN Caecilia, which is confirmed in this Newsweek article.

Now, PMN Caecilia was designed in 1990.  Georgia and Verdana were designed in 1993 and only came out in 1996.  Safe to assume Caecilia wasn’t designed as a screen font.  It appears the main intention was to create a humanist slab serif that could work well for body text.

I found a review of the Cybook Gen3 with a close-up photo of the screen, magnified x6.  Not a great photo, but still instructive.  From the article:

As is the case with all e-paper-based devices, the display does not emit light of its own—unlike other widespread technologies, including CRT, LCD, Plasma, and even OLED; in this respect, it is very similar to real paper. However, as mentioned, the contrast level of the Cybook and other e-readers still falls short. To be specific, the white background appears more gray than white. We took a closer look with a 6X magnifying glass and, in doing so, revealed part of the reason why the e-ink display has such a low contrast, and why the background looks the way it does: as you can see from the image we took, the Cybook display has many tiny, dark “pixels” that, when viewed from a typical reading distance, make the screen appear gray. These pixels are actually the microcapsules that create text on the device.

According to E Ink: “Each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule where they become visible to the user. This makes the surface appear white at that spot. At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that spot.”

What E Ink doesn’t mention is that it’s still struggling to make all the microcapsules turn white when not needed, and this is essentially the reason why we see all those dots when using a magnifying glass and part of the reason why the contrast is still so low.

There have been some specific close-up photos of ePaper that caught my eye:

Looks like the pixels are not in a perfectly orthogonal grid.  Which leads me to believe that a typeface designed for a normal screen may not work as well on ePaper.  Hinting may be a totally different kettle of fish.

I’ve know about  On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness for a while, a video game based on the main characters of the Penny Arcade web comic.  Seeing an ad for the game on the Penny Arcade site, I decided to take a peek at episode one.  I intended only to play the free demo, but it was good enough that I went and got the whole first episode.  I gotta say, it’s nice when somebody gets it right.  The gameplay is similar to Final Fantasy-style RPG games, with a pinch of old LucasArts for flavor and a touch of Lovecraftian tentacled goodness.  The LucasArts feel isn’t surprising,  since Ron Gilbert helped create the game.  Ron’s responsible for the SCUMM engine, as well as the first two Monkey Island Games.  His style meshes well with Penny Arcade’s sense of humor.  It was lots of fun to play.

There’s a Hellboy game or two out there, but it strikes me that this sort of game style, Adventure game feel with RPG battles, would be a perfect fit for Hellboy.  Especially if its done with cel-shading so that it draws more from Mignola’s comic books than the movies.

This is an idea for a Firefox plug in, I’m tentativey calling it Antechamber:
Antechamber is a tool designed to aid people using Google Image Search or other similar resources to collect images on the web.  Antechamber saves a visual history of the last N images you downloaded, and can be set up to dynamically rename files as they’re downloaded.  Antechamber saves a history of naming schemes so you can pic up where you left off during a previous sesssion.  You can create custom "targets" in the sidebar, so that when an image is dragged and dropped onto a target, it gets downloaded to a predetermined folder and assigned a dynamic sequential name

For example, let’s say I’m looking for images of old blues players.  I set up two targets, one for illustrations and one for photos.  the first target is set to rename files dragged to it as ~/images/blues/photo/blues_photo_xx.jpg where xx represents a two-digit number.  The second target downloads images as ~/images/blues/illus/blues_illus_xx.jpg.  As I search through images, I can drag them to either target accordingly.  The history will show me the last several images I downloaded (say, 5 images) along with some basic metadada like size, dimensions and file type.  This way I can avoid accidental repeat downloads, or if I get a better file of the same image, I’ll know to grab it.  Let’s say I got up to 42 good photo images, but had to take a lunch break.  Antechamber will save my searches so that when I come back, I can resume my search.  The images will be numbered 43 and up, since that’s where I left off.

I see this as a tool most likely useful to artists and designers who keep a catalog of visual references and frequently need source material for projects.

Every thesis needs a question. Seems the main question for me is how to make text beautiful on ePaper. There are a few different angles from which you can approach this question. For the bullet-point lovers out there, here’s my initial breakdown:

• Letters
  • typeface/font
  • rendering engine,
• typography & layout

First of all, there’s the matter of letters and how they appear on the screen. It looks to me like there are two main factors affecting digital letters: the font they’re set in and the engine used to render them to screen. Secondly, once you’ve managed the proper display of letters, you need the text to be laid out nicely on-screen. You want whatever layout software you’re using to be capable of sufficiently advanced typography.

So, I have three possible realms to tackle: rendering fonts to ePaper, creating typefaces that are tweaked for ePaper displays, or creating type layout engines for ePaper devices. The first two mean getting up close and personal with ePaper and its physical characteristics: what makes an ePaper pixel? How are they arranged on grid? How do they differ from an LDC or CRT screen? How can they be manipulated for antialiasing or smoothing?

The third choice, layout engines: it doesn’t make much sense for me to write a new layout system for these devices. The typography aspect here has less to do with ePaper itself and more with portable devices. The most sensible thing to do would be to port LaTeX or something to these devices. TeX and LaTeX are not only robust and time-tested, they’ve also been around a loooong time. They were fully functional when disk sizes were measured in KB and not GB. So it’s probably not hard to get a stripped down LaTeX distro running on an embedded device. I don’t really think that this is where I wanna focus my thesis work. Working on rendering systems or tweaking fonts for optimal display are more up my alley, both beng a matter of working with the physical limitations of the display medium.

Fontlab Studio 5.0.2 uses the FreeType font rendering engine. I downloaded the latest stable FreeType release and will investigate it over the summer.