typography

Dalston driving lessons type
September 15, 2008 by pierre

Tags: dalston, posters, public notices, typography | Comments (0)
caragraphs
April 3, 2008 by pierre
Jérôme did a nice use of the pilcrow sign in the Disclosures programme, we were discussing this with him and Martine a few days ago before going to the opening of the exhibition.

Being an amateur unicode explorer I was familiar with the wikipedia entry on sir U+00B6. Recently Jonathan Hoefler wrote an article* that very nicely updated what I knew about it. One of the thing I did not know was that it came from a “c” and not a “p”, this prompted us to the word “caragraphs”, the new official terms in lingonest for those block of text that sometime cannot afford white lines to separate them.

* being a perverse automator, I particularly like Jonathan Hoefler “8 fundamental questions that inform the space of the pilcrow” and the corresponding 768 possible outcomes at the end of the entry.

Tags: design, disclosures, pilcrow, typography | Comments (0)
Electronic Presence & Pocket URI
March 28, 2008 by jerome
Yesterday we all went to the launch of Disclosures, a series of event organised by Gasworks. Disclosures purpose is to scrutinise the notion of openness across fields of cultural production at large..
Electronest is part of the event as commissioned artist/designer for the Pipeline website and we also designed the printed communication.
This morning, like almost every morning, I was looking at the statistics of our various websites; I started to consider the leaflet in which we had the chance to have an extended colophon as an extension of our Electronic Presence – yesterday, on Assembling we released a short report about the re-launch of Electronest’s “home page” and I remembered an idea Pierre explored a little while ago: Generic Business Card.

This morning, the idea of considering those bits of paper which I always neglected (or more exactly which I always tried to neglect) as an extension of our Electronic Presence started to be quite attractive.
Attractive enough for me, to have my own go at it.

Reading WikiPedia, Business Cards evolved from a fusion of traditional trade cards and visiting cards; they are bearing business information about a company or individual. They are shared during formal introductions as a convenience and a memory aid.
It is funny to then read and figure out the similitude with the definition of what a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is: In computing, a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), is a compact string of characters used to identify or name a resource. The main purpose of this identification is to enable interaction with representations of the resource over a network, typically the World Wide Web, using specific protocols.

∗ Business Cards on WikiPedia
∗ URI on WikiPedia
∗ by the way, the program which has a few mistakes and bugs, should be corrected in a future PDF, a sort RC2
∗ Pipeline |* is not yet launched but it should get some content and go live soon

Tags: ambient, beacon, electronic presence, print, tangible, typography, uri | Comments (0)
Disclosures Wall
March 27, 2008 by jerome

This is a 365×270 cm wall inside the Gasworks gallery. It will signal I’ve got the books, you’ve got the brains… and the Disclosures series of events; it’s featuring the font LaPolice by François Rappo, edited by B&P Type Foundry.

Tags: design, disclosures, gasworks, typography, wall | Comments (0)
playbill programming
March 19, 2008 by pierre
First steps toward Anthony Ellis playbill application (a small text editor that typeset the words typed in the font with the closest matching name – e.g. the word “film” rendered in “filosfia” ).

Points 1 and 2 below are programming details, point 3 is an example of what we can do now, 4. is what we need to do next.

1. Interface with the operating system, list all available fonts.

We can use Objective-C object called NSFontManager and and a method called availableFonts(). Using python’s bridge to Objective-c included in NodeBox.
```
from AppKit import NSFontManager
def fonts():
```
```
	return NSFontManager.sharedFontManager().availableFonts()
```
We can now modify this function to make it return a filtered list of fonts name that match a certain string of characters:
```
from AppKit import NSFontManager
def fonts(s):
    return [f for f in NSFontManager.sharedFontManager().availableFonts() if f.lower().startswith(s.lower())]
```
2. Find a w[ord]‘s first match in the list of font names.

In python for example, lets say “write()” is an imaginary function that write a string in specified typeface, “fonts()” is the function already defined that take a string and return a list of matching typeface names, and “s” is just a string that we want to typeset.
```
from string import letters, whitespace, punctuation

s_buff, f_buff = '', ''

for c in s:
    if c in letters:
        s_buff += c
        if fonts(s_buff) != []:
            f_buff = fonts(s_buff)[0]
    elif c in whitespace or c in punctuation:
        write(c)
        write(s_buff, f_buff)
        s_buff, f_buff= '', ''
```
We have a small datastructure that contains the two things we are matching, strings and font names (s_buff and f_buff), we then conditionally fill and empty theses buffers as we scan the input string.

3. Example

download the code: playbill-0.txt

4. Next step

The next step is to integrate this typesetting process in a small text editor. The text field will need to support multiple fonts in the same field, and it will need to return “key” events that we can use as input stream for what we already programmed. As Jérôme pointed out, another solution is to make an infinite loop in parallel of the editor that “poll” it regularly for new characters.

In what typeface should we typeset the punctuation? I’m not sure if it is a good idea but we could imagine replicating Anthony idea at the scale of a typeface using glyphs names: you take a punctuation sign name, like “comma”, “dot” and find the closest match in the font list : comma => commic sans, dot => dogma, etc…
Tags: automation, code, dev, playbill, project, python, typeset, typography | Comments (0)