TV Fonts

Erik van Blokland have done a font for MTV in the nineties. Now available on Letterror website. The design take in count some TV parameters I think.
www.letterror.com

http://www.tiresias.org/fonts/index.htm is a nice one.

Yes, NewCritter from LettError is a nice one!

I guess those "fonts designed or optimized for the web" as some FontFont's will do well on a tv-screen.
As long as the font has a large x-height, short ascenders/descenders, a bit medium in thickness and not to tight in spacing it'll work on a screen.

Or..?

> NewCritter

Unfortunately MTV decided not to use it.

--

I have an article (somewhere) about a font called NBC36, which was a very interesting case of optimization for the TV screen.

Also check out Poppl Laudatio - surprisingly suitable. And if you want to set some very small but very legible text, try Rotis Sans Black (it really works).

hhp

Type requirements for television need to be differentiated here. Display type? Crawls and scrolls? IDs? Captions and subtitles?

Good point, although the "singularity" of TV font requirements is only towards the small scale.

hhp

I believe Wim Crouwel's New Alphabet was designed for on-screen display. Maybe not quite what you are looking for, but interesting anyway.

Crouwel New Alphabet can be very helpful to the understanding of the forthcoming news coverage of the Iraki war. No?

:-)
I don't get the joke - please explain!

hhp

Personal note for Toby Stokes:
Hi, Toby, I'm not dead!
Everyone's got my word that my f***** book will come out sooner or later. And I'll keep that word. I'm just a bit crazy and have an exquisite attitude in loosing time.

And I see with joy finally Pretty you Are (instead of May be...)

Btw: LettError rocks as usual! Combine them with John Butler and you have the cutting edge in font-tech experimentation...

>I believe Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet
>was designed for on-screen display.

In the _new alphabet_ Quadrat-Print that Crouwel published (1967), I don't think he says the 'new alphabet' is meant just for screens. Crouwel does talk about CRT displays, but I think he is referring to CRT composing systems (saying that the forms of the 'new alphabet' were suited to the CRT). Here is a quote: 'The reproduction method by means of the cathode ray, the same principle as used for television, is taken as a starting point.' The last two pages do show what looks like a TV still of an astronaut and phrases set in the 'new alphabet' are laid over the photo. The caption says: 'Example of integrated "scanned" Typo-graphic.' Maybe Crouwel explained the on-screen use of the 'new alphabet' somewhere else?

>I don’t get the joke - please explain!

Maybe it is that both Crouwel and Bush have offered poor solutions to difficult problems?

Well there you go, thanks Andy.
Shows you what I know. The whole 60s were a blur for me. Wait, wait, I'm only 24, nevermind.

>I don’t get the joke - please explain!
Maybe it's because the image I linked to was from an article about arabic type?

All Saddaam really needs to do is simply change the country's spelling to "iRaq" - there's no way the Anglos could bring themselves to bomb that.

hhp

Maybe it is that both Crouwel and Bush have offered poor solutions to difficult problems?

Oh, come on.

It seems that few people have understood that the 'New Alphabet' is a conceptual alphabet, even a philosophical statement, in a sense. And in this it is in the general spirit of the Kwadraat-Bladen. Andy, you can check in your booklet: "The Quadrat-Prints are a series of experiments [my emphasis] in printing ranging over the fields of graphic design, the plastic arts, literature, architecture and music."

regards,

But the wellspring of the experiment is a fallacy.

hhp

But the wellspring of the experiment is a fallacy.

Why? Because you disagree with, well, its "formative" approach?. It's dealing with another aspect of the problem (that even when your main interest is the "reading process" you can't ignore): the relationship of shapes to their technological basis. And, BTW, we have seen the same problem being tackled in a similar way, thirty years later, in so many pixel fonts for low-res display. So Crouwel's rationale, as quoted by Andy, was even quite farsighted.

>Oh, come on.

I'm not saying I saw that connection. I was just guessing at what the joke might have been. The 'new alphabet' is interesting to me, as is most of Crouwel's work (that I've seen), and I don't dismiss it as a joke.

>It seems that few people have
>understood that the ‘New Alphabet’
>is a conceptual alphabet, even a
>philosophical statement, in a
>sense. And in this it is in
>the general spirit of the Kwadraat-
>Bladen. Andy, you can check in
>your booklet: “The Quadrat-Prints
>are a series of experiments [my
>emphasis] in printing ranging over the
>fields of graphic design, the plastic
>arts, literature, architecture and
>music.”

I understand there was an experimental aspect to them, but you need to take Crouwel at his word, don't you? In the short introduction, he seems to want to show that he is seriously considering big things: techniques, aesthetics, 'the machine', etc. A lot of it sounds like a rehash of some familiar New Typography-era ideas.

But he does say: 'The proposed unconventional alphabet shown here is intended merely as an initial step in a direction which could possibly be followed for further research.' Maybe the point is that it really wasn't worthy of more work, but the ideas in Unger's counter-proposal (a later Quadrat-Print) did prove to be practicable and useful.

he seems to want to show that he is seriously considering big things: techniques, aesthetics, ‘the machine’, etc. A lot of it sounds like a rehash of some familiar New Typography-era ideas.

I wouldn't say "rehash", but I think that's indeed the general, optimistic, mood of the time. The wonderment with computers, the conquest of the moon, and so on.

But he does say: ‘The proposed unconventional alphabet shown here is intended merely as an initial step in a direction which could possibly be followed for further research.’ Maybe the point is that it really wasn’t worthy of more work, but the ideas in Unger’s counter-proposal (a later Quadrat-Print) did prove to be practicable and useful.

Well, some people are inventors. Some are recyclers of traditions. The world needs both kinds, I think. The ultimate proof of success of Crouwel's New Alphabet, BTW, is that here we are, 36 years later, debating it. How much of today's typographic work will be remembered, let alone discussed, 36 years from now? I don't think I'll still be here to see, though!

> Because you disagree with, well, its “formative” approach?

No, because it reduces mankind to consciousness - the classic fatal flaw of all of Modernism in fact.

Crouwel isn't irrelevant, not at all. But his approach was over-simple, like a teen-ager trying to woo a 30-something.

BTW, we are also still debating Elvis.

hhp

BTW, we are also still debating Elvis.

Hrant, that's irrelevant.

While MTV declined to use Letterror's Critter, they did frequently use their propriety face MTVPE by Plazm (site path: Portfolio:Broadcast:MTV). It was designed specifically for broadcast display, meant to be read quickly in short bursts and at any angle (yes, even 180°). MTV seems to have reverted to Helvetica (and of course, Kabel Shadow) for programs and promos, but for a while, they were fully into MTVPE.

As for parameters, I'm not aware of any. Just make sure that the type is clear enough to be readable in a bright, glaring, flickering low-res display.

> NBC36

Correction: Thanks to a post on Typophile, I've realized that it was called CBS News 36.

hhp

Andy mentions 'bush' without context...

The bush logotype was inspired after having seen the lettering of Brett Wickens on 'atmosphere'. My concept with my interpretation of the forms was not anything to do with legibility, conversely the idea was that you saw a word-image rather than a word, the angular styling was a reductionist process transforming the set of letters to a unified mark - identified by 'those who know' therefore fencing off those who don't. Later, I read about Wim's 'New alphabet' in the Thames and Hudson encyclopaedia of Graphic Design and Designers, subsequently studying the original conceptual intentions of the letters in the 1967 kwadraatblad Type Specimen.

It was at this time (early 90s), and still to this day I am interested in the idea of a soft modernism where the hard edges are taken off sans serif somewhat. This is appropriate as I was using VegaTVSH-Regular from Mannesmann Scangraphic GmbH which I believe was designed for on screen use.

/m