Recently Commented
- 05.25.13
Taking Your Fonts to Market: Foundry, Reseller, or Go Solo?
Kent Lew: Stephen, I've always appreciated the various iterations of this overview that you've offered. I also appreciate how unbiased … - 05.24.13
Aften Screen
Ian: Aften Screen comes with bold and italic and a separate small caps. I hope that the typeface gets expanded to have bold italic… - 05.13.13
Library Subscriptions: The Future of Fonts? Shall We Sing or Cry?
Rudy: I think that you forgot one major question: Why would a type designer continue to develop type? Their part of the cake become… - 05.04.13
Roof Kerning in Amsterdam
Matijs van Zuijlen: So, does the current actual placement of the letters match the one in the artist's impression?… - 05.02.13
Instant
Hrant: Instant confuses me… The part of me that loves innovation gets happy looking at it, but the part of me that insists on sober … - 04.26.13
Krul
Tim: I love that a face so decorative is this legible. A very nice achievement.… - 04.16.13
Source Sans
Hrant: There's something I'd like to clear up, although it might essentially be merely a terminological issue: assuming it's true th… - 04.14.13
Roboto is a Four-headed Frankenfont
Christoph: Amazing! Thanks, Stephen. And the fun just never ends.… - 04.09.13
Comenia
Andrew Boardman: A beautiful and extremely usable "superfamily" that I hadn't considered previously. Thanks, Florian, as always.… - 04.09.13
Balkan Sans
Thomas Dang: Interesting concept but it's difficult to read and the kerning leaves something to be desired. I'm certain that it would not … - 04.07.13
The Elements of Typographic Style, Version 4.0
Craig Eliason: Thanks for this well considered and written review. For me, I never considered Bringhurst's book a bible. Among other quirks,… - 03.31.13
JAF Bernini Sans
Hrant: Thanks to Bill Dawson's piece on XK9 I just realized that Bernini is actually a brother-sister twin, with one being more rese… - 03.20.13
Our Favorite Typefaces of 2012
Stephen Coles: Nick Sherman raises good questions about quantity. I think it’s useful to have a discussion about what this list means and wh… - 03.19.13
Turnip
Hrant: I love Turnip, for the magical transformation it performs between display and text, and the wonder it injects into the craft … - 03.18.13
Quintet
Stephen Coles: It’s been over a year since I saw Quintet on the KABK class of 2011 site and I am still amazed by it. It was a monumental ach…
So, does the current actual placement of the letters match the one in the artist’s impression?
I love the geekiness of this article.
All that matters is that they will have to face “RDAM” ’till 2013…
This wouldn’t have been a problem if they had used sub-window antialiasing.
In the old day of “fly by sight,” usually in small airplanes, your “GPS” was follow the train rails and your “location servicies” were the name of the railroad station/city written in the roof.
So, you still can flight by sight and know that you are in Amsterdam!
“Window pixels?” surely…..Wixels!
I love Schreuder’s work and his attention to detail, but anyone who’s worked on jobs of such a large scale, knows damn well that a one window “gap” is nit-picking. Take any hinting job and you’ll see exactly how “even” some spacing decisions have to be made: pixels are being sacrificed all the time for the sake of the general balance of the wordspace.
For the sake of completeness, why not give Benthem Crouwel Architects and the typographers a chance to have their say, too?
Went back to check the aritst’s impression. It appears that the actual placement does not match the sketch exactly: the drawing shows 47 windows, not 46, to the right of -RDAM.
The left margin can’t be checked as it is lost in an artistic haze.
I request the measures of the windows to be taken. Do they all have the same widths? There is no way of telling if the word will be centered if we don’t have an exact measure of the singular windows, I’m afraid.
You can see read some reactions by the creators in this story on nrc.nl.
Great idea, bad execution…
Just been at Amsterdam station: it’s great! The windows/pixels are soo large, that, at first, you berely figure those are letters. Well, I’m not going to fly above that roof anytime soon, and Mr Schreuders neither, I gather.
The metal beams supporting the roof are interfering with the pixels, that’s a fact – so I can’t agree with Mr Schreuders’ who wants to convince us of the contrary. Apart of the sensation-seeking tone of this piece, I’m surprised how easily the digital world bashes a good piece of work, only because a designer known for doing printing matter seems to have gotten the itch for counting pixels and measuring monumental pieces with the same ruler.
The nrc article is even more pitiful, stating the type is skewed. Oh well, it’s not skew, it’s straight, and gives Amsterdam the typographic wow-factor of the most designed country out there. Not convinced? Come over!
Whoa! I never claimed that there is no interference between roof beams and windows. That was a point raised by others (in the nrc.next article mentioned here earlier); an irrelevant point because the word AMSTERDAM is clearly meant to be read from outside the bus station (and at some distance at that), not from the inside (where the word is not readable anyway).
I do like the design. My piece merely raises some small typographic concerns, possibly prematurely, and hopefully wrongly.
What is relevant to me is the sheer fact that, at the distance you show the station roof photographed, if one ever gets there, the human eye cannot distinguish that grand imprecision. At that scale, my eye focusses on one point at a time, and then rolls on to the next point. I assume yours, too. And, if it comes to that disputed math precision, is symmetry per definition make it a better design? the difference between a cover title and ambiental typography at a scale of one to thousands would be that that one window equals to about a millimeter, maybe less. That brings the whole issue down to a typographic feuilleton.
BTW, NS had been refurbishing quite a few stations across the country lately, with some of them carrying true typographic disasters worth documenting.
… funny that the gap now leaves the two words ‘am’ & ‘rdam’ (an abbreviation for rotterdam…) (Read more…)
I agree with Piet Schreuders. If you are going to do something, do it right. But then again, according to Edith Piaf, its the imperfections that make us great. Is God in the details, or the devil?
We can only hope that the “ster” will fit.
I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, because if there is a error, one wouldn’t actually spot it unless you were really high above the whole word of Amsterdam, thus the eye sees the word in it’s entirety for example if one was in a helicopter or airplane. For most people at ground level one would only see part of the word thus not spotting a error (if there is a error)