Ordained Ministry of OpenType

Written by Christian Palino on July 14, 2005

Veer has released an absolutely beautiful OpenType font called Ministry Script, designed by Alejandro Paul. According to Paul, his latest creation is “a time capsule that marks both the American ad art of the 1920s, and the current new-millennium acrobatics of digital type.” Ligatures include standard, discretionary, contextual, and swash features. [Ministry Script joins Bickham Script Pro and Zapfino Extra in setting records for sheer quantity of glyphs. – SC]

With its alternates and variants, Ministry Script retains the vitality of hand drawn calligraphy amazingly well. While the root of the overall style is certainly dated, the font’s letterforms and combinations seem to me incredibly contemporary.

Christian Palino is a designer and educator living in San Francisco. He is currently a Product Design Manager at Facebook and teaches Interaction Design at CCA. He previously worked at OpenTable, IDEO and Adaptive Path.

20 Comments

  1. Peter Bilak says:

    “Ministry Script contains 99,814 kerning pairs.”

    Wow, i am wondering in which applications this font will work if it has, as it says on the Veer website, almost 100.000 kerning pairs. And since the OT font should use class kerning, somethign is not right here.

  2. Chris Mawer says:

    Alejandro, congratulations for a great deal of beautiful work.

    OTOH, I can hardly wait for the massive overuse of all the swashes, ligatures, front and back ends, swizzles, doo-dads, grommets, swashes, discretionary and indescretionary characters, et c., that will inevitably follow.

    A prize for the most overblown use of this lovely font?>

  3. “Christian: Thanks for the plug!

    Peter: Ministry does use class-based kerning. The number of kerning pairs mentioned is just the number obtained via the expand kerning feature of Fontlab. I did it out of curiosity, just to find out how many kerning pairs the font had in total. I assure you the kerning does work in all applications that support OpenType.”

  4. Nick Shinn says:

    Nice one, Alejandro.

    However, I should point out, re your blurb at Veer, that it should read “Mr Nick will demonstrate at 9 a.m. contextual alternates … in New York City…” (TypeCon, July 21st).

  5. Dirk Llewelyn says:

    Ministry Script joins Bickham Script Pro and Zapfino Extra in setting records for sheer quantity of glyphs. — well, if you mean average number of glyphs per codepoint. Obviously unicode fonts like Code2000 or Arial Unicode MS have more glyphs.

  6. Ahh yes. Sticklers. I should have said “alternate glyphs”. Most folks don’t yet know what a codepoint is.

  7. Peter Bilak says:

    Thanks for the clarifications. I am still wondering if there is a physical limitations to a number of glyphs and kernign information that applications can handle. As you might know Word or other text processors will only process first few thousands pairs. Other applications may have their own limitations. It is hard to guarantee that the font will work everywhere consistently just because you worked according to the current specifications.

  8. Guys, I am very flattered by your comparing Ministry to Bickham Pro and Zapfino Extra. I still have a lot of growing to reach the level of those greats.

    Peter: Of course nobody can guarantee how every layout engine handles a particular font. But as I stated in the Ministry Script PDF, I used the inerface of the layout engine in Adobe applications as the main guideline for the OpenType work. The font was thoroughly tested on the CS versions of Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop, and everything, including kerning, worked just fine. Current versions of Microsoft’s Office applications do not support stylistic or contextual alternates, so the testing in Word was just for simple recognition of the font file and basic functionality within the program. I don’t think Microsoft Word is really a design program where using hi-tech fonts is such a good idea.

  9. Dirk Llewelyn says:

    Microsoft Word is truely aweful with regards to type, if only for the default setting being “apply no kerning whatsoever”. Of course it’s equally aweful in other ares of graphic design, like simply (reliably) inserting an image, dealing with columns, etc. etc. Not to mention the downright ugly default styles for things like tables-of-content etc. The world would probably be much better off without it.

    I’ve known people to use Microsoft Powerpoint to create (lengthy) A4 sized reports in preference to Word!

    I blame Word’s default non-use of kerning for the public at large not knowing about kerning, and for so many typefaces (even from the big foundries) having crappy kerning.

  10. John Butler says:

    Simply gorgeous. It’s very encouraging to see so many type designers starting to really exploit the full potential of contextual features. I can’t wait to see more…

  11. It’s an absolute stunner. Congrats.

  12. Daniel says:

    What is a codepoint?

  13. Dirk Llewelyn says:

    A codepoint is a point in unicode; for the most part this is comparable to a “character” in type-1, except that unicode is a 32bit code (of which only the 16bit ones are currently being allocated), and that it also incorporates symbols and codes for stuff like zero-width-non-joiners, etc. The code2000 font has glyphs for 60000 codepoints (including unofficial ones like Klingon).

    A codepoint can be encoded in many encodings, like UTF-8, which may take as little as 1, or as much as 6 bytes to encode one codepoint. This is why it’s handy to refer to codepoints as codepoints and not as characters, doublebytes, or whatever.

    Ministry script has many alternate glyphs for single or multiple (automatic ligature) codepoints.

  14. Dirk Llewelyn says:

    So now they know.

  15. DANIEL says:

    Thanks for the explanation Dirk.

    But can a single code point consist of a combination of two or more characters/glyphs (or is it always a single character/glyph)? Say the classic combination f and i. Could that be a single codepoint that triggers an alternate glyph like the ligature fi?

  16. Shay says:

    It’s a beautiful, beautiful work. I just wish I had a good reason (or some spare money) to buy it, just so I could play with it. Right now I’m just staring at the PDF, zooming in and out…

  17. Nathan Myers says:

    I hope this won’t be taken as a criticism, but I was surprised not to find a ligature for “sc”, the one with a gratuitious loop over the top. Deliberate or just forgot?

  18. Nathan – it’s a fair question. That ligature is historically found in many serif text faces, but it’s not a common script lig. One of the reasons Alejandro’s faces work well is that the ligatures are usually used to enhance the natural flow of the type, not necessarily for decoration.

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