TDC2 2003 : Winning Entries

It's interesting to compare it to last year: the number of total entries and those from the US were exactly the same, but the proportion of US winners has plummeted from 2/3-rds to 1/3-rd, and that's not counting the fact that 2 of the US winners were in a non-Latin script. Are Americans no longer designing good type, are they trying to save money (more than people from other countries), or did the judges simply have more of a European taste -- whatever that is -- this time?

hhp

BTW:
> Low density scans cannot do complete justice

I couldn't agree more, but that doesn't excuse the spotty presentation quality: like the 8-bit scaling artifacts in some of the glyph close-ups (Carlin, Falafil, Strada, Tactile), or the unnecessary halos in the Laurentian detail, or the stray pixels (Keefbats).

Anyway, I'll be looking at the fonts closely soon - some of them look very nice indeed!

hhp

Some superb fonts - clearly some good judging - but awful presentation on these results announcement pages.
My favorites: Sauna, Laurentian, Tactile and Strada - in that order(!).

'Spotty' and 'awful' say it all; if I'd sweated blood to produce something as elegant as Fontana (completely beyond my abilities), I'd be spiiting blood at the sight of these dreadful pages.

I quite appreciate the TDC's site, how ever imperfect, and expect to license one or more of the winners when they come on the market. I still eagerly await Slimbach's Brioso Pro.

Were these entries submitted by fax?

:->

Anyway, about the fonts themselves, I like:
- Arabic Typography (although you can't tell how it actually works from that page).
- Gentium (diacritic Nirvana)
- Falafil (although I can't read it - it must be Hebrew?)
- Fontana (really really works in the pages of tipoGrafica)
- Press (that page is only the tip of the iceberg, it seems)
- Sauna (love those sibling italics)

And I think Suite is the most original.

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BTW, is anybody else confused by the categorization? Some of the ones in Text are more complex than some in Type System.

hhp

I'm a bit annoyed they don't tell you anything about the font. I'm not looking for a dissertation or anything, but it might be nice to see what the person was thinking.
And what were they thinking selecting a section symbol as a sample glyph?
Suite has a really nice "g." I want to see more of it at larger sizes. Sakkal is neat. Looks like Gia's ethnic cousin.

> they don’t tell you anything

You're supposed to cough up the dough for the annual, dude... What do you think the whole point is? :-/

hhp

Surely the best way to coax the annual fee out of the viewer would be to wow them with a good sample of rich, deep and wonderfully designed pages...

...instead of really bad scans.
You'd think, wouldn't you?

What's really annoying is the persistent
refusal to listen to good advice.

hhp

Some people think too much.
\/

Hrant, Filafil is in the Hebrew cursive, rather than the more typically printed square letters. It has alternative characters, like italic. It is gorgeous. I haven't seen a latin font with that kind of stroke - kind of a cross between a chinese pointed brush and spray paint.

> Hebrew cursive

It's funny, after all this time of not knowing about this, I see two examples (the other on Typophile) in a matter of days! I'm getting the feeling that this cursive style can envigorate (and even optimize the functionality of) Hebrew type design - as long as its handwritten aspect isn't taken literally.

The only problem is the name: it's already taken (although with one letter difference) by FontFont...

BTW, I had the pleasure of meeting Habib Khouri in Rome. I didn't realize how accomplished he is - plus he's the nicest guy! If you need any Arabic work done, make sure to contact him: info@avantype.com

hhp

>I’m getting the feeling that this cursive style can envigorate (and even optimize the functionality of) Hebrew type design

Well, the thing is that people in Israel use both "cursive" and "square" lettering. It's not so much a matter of functionality as it is of preference. I learned to write both ways, when I was younger I wrote mostly in the square version, as it is supposed to be the basic you must learn. Then in junior high-school I learned to write the cursive version which is the most common writing method for people, because it's less harsh, and more personal.

You do see more "square" typeface designs than "cursive." It's like latin alphabets, there are more Sans Serifs than Script typefaces. Mainly because Sans are more usable in print media. Any media really.

I haven't talked, or practiced, about this for the longest time, so don't take my word a 100%.

I tried to go to the Spanish TypeAxis
WEB site for a better look at Suite. Web site was so *@+#! cute I couldn't figure out how to get past the obligatory introductory Flash showing-off to see the real pages dealing with preview, samples, and purchase. Why do designers so often make it impossible for mere mortals to find out how to navigate their site? Anyway, if anyone knows how to get past the two intro pages or has a URL for the real content pages, I'd appreciate them posting it here.

I’m a bit annoyed they don’t tell you anything about the font. I’m not looking for a dissertation or anything, but it might be nice to see what the person was thinking.

Here's the description text that will accompany the Arabic Typesetting exhibition entry:

Arabic Typesetting is a new design in the Naskh style, particularly well suited for traditional book typography, an area neglected by digital type. The font provides fine typographic control by marrying the latest OpenType technology to traditional calligraphic and typographic models. It achieves maximum readability by opening bowls and counters, balancing the proportions of stroke and white space in letters that typically cause problems at small sizes, and by contextually differentiating similar forms. The Arabic Typesetting font contains over 2,100 glyphs, including contextual alternates, ligatures, and language-specific forms.

Great care was taken in the design and digitization of all outlines. The graceful curves, the dynamic of blunt and rounded terminals, and the contrast between thick and thin strokes are consistent and lively throughout the typeface. In addition to providing all the correct shapes for quality Arabic typesetting, the same care and consistency has been applied in glyphs used for the many other languages, such as Farsi, Urdu, Sindhi, etc., that are written in variants of the Arabic script. This means that documents incorporating several language will have a harmonious appearance.

The Arabic glyphs are accompanied by Latin letters designed to achieve a balance of color, weight and proportion between the two scripts. Typically, the trend in coordinating Arabic and Latin types has been to unhappily force the Arabic to match the proportions of the Latin. In this font, likely for the first time, the Latin has been adjusted to harmonize with the Arabic: the ascenders and descenders have been lengthened to echo the proportions of the Arabic extenders, and the usual impact of capital letters has been reduced by making them a similar weight to the lowercase.

Nice.
Where can we see some good mixed-script samples?

hhp

An interesting example of mixed scripts designed to harmonize is Khoury's 'Merkury', at advantype.com. This is a roman version of his award-winning Hebrew Filafil. It would harmonize perfectly with the Hebrew Filafil, but to my eye it looks 'wrong' as a Roman. Hebrew has thick horizontals and thin verticals, the opposite of Roman. 'Merkury' follows the Hebrew pattern in a Roman face, and what was graceful and delightful in the Hebrew becomes heavy and awkward in the Roman, to my eyes anyway.

The 'easy way' to harmonize the Hebrew and Roman is by doing both monoline, as in the El Al logo.

I will be interested to see how John Hudson solved the problem for Arabic, which seems graphically even further from the Roman. Amazingly, Keith Tam, on his site, posts a Chinese and Roman font that harmonize beautifully. The problem of harmonizing different scripts is fascinating, as you would think that it's impossible, but some manage to do it.

I've put a screenshot online that shows a close-up from a bilingual glossary. I expect MS will provide some more extensive samples when they release the font (it will have its own page at MST). The screenshot gives you some idea of the relative proportions and weights. One of the challenges was trying to balance the colour of two scripts with completely different ducti. The screenshot is perhaps not the best example of well-matched colour due to the presence of the medial ayn. The Latin is based on an unreleased design I've been working on for a few years: I made the bowls rounder and the extenders longer for Arabic Typesetting. I wanted the Latin to be quite neutral, so that the Arabic would carry as much of the stylistic weight as possible, which is why the curves are so soft and round; in the Latin on which this is based, there is more inflection on the curves. Not shown in this screenshot are the relatively short and lightweight caps. When I first designed the caps, I kept the typical proportion of weight to lowercase, i.e. slightly heavier, but found that they really jumped out when a few capitalised words, e.g. place names, were set in the middle of Arabic text. So now the caps correspond much more closely to the weight of the Latin lowercase.

This is very much a case of one script being subordinate to the other: by itself, the Latin looks like a bit of a freak show. The novetly in this font is that the Latin is subordinate to the Arabic, and not vice versa, which is the usual and much more damaging approach. It's remarkable how much abuse the Latin script can take and remain readable.

{I'd forgotten about this...}

> to my eye [Merkury] looks ‘wrong’ as a Roman

Really? Even after all that experimentation in the 90s? I think -as John alludes to- the audience for Latin is more "tolerant" of strangeness, enough not to have a real problem with this design (for display work, obviously).

> The problem of harmonizing different scripts is fascinating

Yes, and a wonderful challenge too!

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> I wanted the Latin to be quite neutral

But the Arabic is also pretty neutral - which is fine. BTW, the color seems to be very well matched, and in fact although the apparent sizes seem tilted towards the Latin, I myself feel that it's right where the balance of compromises needs it to be, considering the real workings of readability. Very nice!

> The novetly in this font is that the Latin is subordinate to the Arabic

This is indeed as rare as it is needed. There are only two other such cases that I know of: Carter's Cadmus/Skia, and a recent design by Michail Semoghlu (both Greek). And there's still only one font system that does it both ways, for maximal versatility: Nour&Patria. Toot toot. :->

> It’s remarkable how much abuse the Latin script can take and remain readable.

My suspicion is that this is actually a cultural phenomenon, not a "physiological" one. Arabic can also take a lot of abuse before becoming dysfunctional, but: people will think they can't read it more often than in Latin; at this point Arabic culture needs less experimentation and more "holding the fort" than Latin - which isn't to say there are things to be gained through its reduction of chirography.

hhp