Adobe Devanagari typeface

Typeface design: collaborative work commissioned by Adobe Inc. Published but unreleased. The Adobe Devanagari typefaces were commissioned from Tiro Typeworks and collaboratively designed by Tim Holloway, Fiona Ross and John Hudson, beginning in 2005. The types were officially released in 2009. The design brief was to produce a typeface for modern business communications in Hindi and other languages, to be legible both in print and on screen. Adobe Devanagari was designed to be highly readable in a range of situations including quite small sizes in spreadsheets and in continuous text setting, as well as at display sizes, where the full character of the typeface reveals itself. The construction of the letters is based on traditional penmanship but possesses less stroke contrast than many Devanagari types, in order to maintain strong, legible forms at smaller sizes. To achieve a dynamic, fluid style the design features a rounded treatment of distinguishing terminals and stroke reversals, open counters that also aid legibility at smaller sizes, and delicately flaring strokes. Together, these details reveal an original hand and provide a contemporary approach that is clean, clear and comfortable to read whether in short or long passages of text. This new approach to a traditional script is intended to counter the dominance of rigid, staccato-like effects of straight verticals and horizontals in earlier types and many existing fonts. OpenType Layout features in the fonts provide both automated and discretionary access to an extensive glyph set, enabling sophisticated typography. Many conjuncts preferred in classical literary texts and particularly in some North Indian languages are included; these literary conjuncts may be substituted by specially designed alternative linear forms and fitted half forms. The length of the ikars—ि and ी—varies automatically according to adjacent letter or conjunct width. Regional variants of characters and numerals (e.g. Marathi forms) are included as alternates. Careful attention has been given to the placements of all vowel signs and modifiers. The fonts include both proportional and tabular numerals in Indian and European styles. Extensive kerning covers several thousand possible combinations of half forms and full forms to anticipate arbitrary conjuncts in foreign loan words. _____

Alverata: Latin, Greek and Cyrillic typeface

Alverata: a typeface design for Europe This typeface is a response to the extraordinarily diverse forms of letters of the Latin alphabet in manuscripts and inscriptions in the Romanesque period (c. 1000–1200). While the Romanesque did provide inspiration for architectural lettering in the nineteenth century, these letterforms have not until now been systematically considered and redrawn as a working typeface. The defining characteristic of the Romanesque letterform is variety: within an individual inscription or written text, letters such as A, C, E and G might appear with different forms at each appearance. Some of these forms relate to earlier Roman inscriptional forms and are therefore familiar to us, but others are highly geometric and resemble insular and uncial forms. The research underlying the typeface involved the collection of a large number of references for lettering of this period, from library research and direct on-site ivestigation. This investigation traced the wide dispersal of the Romanesque lettering tradition across the whole of Europe. The variety of letter widths and weights encountered, as well as variant shapes for individual letters, offered both direct models and stylistic inspiration for the characters and for the widths and weight variants of the typeface. The ability of the OpenType format to handle multiple stylistic variants of any one character has been exploited to reflect the multiplicity of forms available to stonecutters and scribes of the period. To make a typeface that functions in a contemporary environment, a lower case has been added, and formal and informal variants supported. The pan-European nature of the Romanesque design tradition has inspired an pan-European approach to the character set of the typeface, allowing for text composition in all European languages, and the typeface has been extended into Greek and Cyrillic, so that the broadest representation of European languages can be achieved.

Sarkar Bengali typeface

Fiona Ross, Tim Holloway (co-designers) were commissioned by the renowned newspaper and publishing house Anandabazar Patrika (ABP) to design a new low-contrast typeface in a contemporary style for print and screen use in its publications. Ross and Holloway designed ABP's Bengali house typeface (Linotype Bengali - the first digital Bengali font) that has been in daily use in its newspaper since 1982. The design team was augmented by Neelakash Kshetrimayum; OpenType production undertaken by John Hudson. This Bengali typeface is the first fully functional OpenType design for the script. It demonstrates innovative features that resolve problems which hitherto hindered the successful execution of low-contrast Bengali text fonts: this connecting script of over 450 characters has deep verticals, spiralling strokes, wide characters, and intersecting ascenders. The new design has solutions to overcome the necessity to implement wide interlinear spacing and sets more words to the line than has yet been possible. This project therefore combines the use of aesthetic, technical and linguistic skills and is highly visible in newspapers of the largest newspaper group and publishing house in West Bengal in print and on-line. The design and development of Sarkar has positive implications for other non-Latin script designs, just as the Linotype Bengali typeface formed the blueprint for new non-Latin designs three decades ago. Sarkar was released on 31 August 2012 with the launch of Anandabazar Patirka's new newspaper Ebela.

Adobe Bickham Script Greek typeface

Design support for typeface design: collaborative work commissioned by Adobe, Inc. Published 2011. The original Bickham typeface was based on the hands of the 18th century writing master George Bickham. The ornate script represented the apogee of the art of formal writing with a steel nib, and defined the visual style for decorated, formal documents. In 2010 Adobe revised and extended the typeface, with the express purpose of making it a showcase for OpenType technology, demonstrating the visual importance of using different glyph forms in different contexts, employing contextual substitution rules. Although Bickham had published a single example of a Greek style, it was a standalone exercise, never intended to match the Latin. The key challenge was to identify historical records for appropriate Greek writing, preferably by writers familiar with the language, adapt them for digital typography and the particularities of contextual substitution, in a manner that would not make the Greek a ‘second-class citizen’. Research involved uncovering and analysing appropriate contemporary and later writing examples to identify both the range of writing styles of the period, and the manner of joining letters in written Greek with both pointed pens and broad nibs. This work was essential to make up for the comparative lack of relevant material by Bickham, as well as investigating the possible range of stylistic variants that were approved for the final typeface, which attempted to emulate a written texture through complex substitutions. This aspect of the work is highly original for implementing a substantial number of contextual alternates and ligatures. These were reviewed in the context of use, bringing together an analysis of occurring letter combinations and patterns, and the design of stylistic alternates to imitate natural handwriting.

On systems and quality in typeface design

This text extends some ideas presented in a keynote lecture of the 5th Encontro de Tipografia conference, in Barcelos, Portugal, in November 2014. The paper discusses problems of identifying the location and encoding of design decisions, the implications of digital workflows for capturing knowledge generating through design practice, and the consequences of the transformation of production tools into commodities. It concludes with a discussion of the perception of added value in typeface design.

You make it happen: document demand, typeface supply

The basic premise of this article is that typefaces reflect, and respond to, the conditions of making and using documents; and that demand for evolving document genres drives the development of new typefaces. The article describes how the combination of a narrow range for functionally acceptable letters and paragraphs, and a wide range of possibilities to express these arrangements, offers a revealing tool for examining changes in the perceptions of professionals in visual communication. Beyond technical issues, the choices of document makers allow insights into wider trends such as urbanisation, demographic changes, education standards, and wider issues of visual literacy.

Adobe Garamond Premier Pro Greek

In 2003, through a conference presentation in Vancouver and a series of exchanges with Lemon, Leonidas convinced Adobe to substantially extend the coverage of the Greek script in forthcoming Adobe typefaces. The revised brief for Garamond was extended to include, for the first time in a digital typeface, extensive polytonic support, full archaic characters, and small capitals with optional polytonic diacritics; these features should be implemented with respect for the Greek language’s complex rules for case conversion, allowing full dictionary support regardless of the features applied. This project was the first where these issues were addressed, both from a documentation and a development point of view. Leonidas’ responsibilities lay with researching historical and current conventions, developing specifications for the appearance and behaviour of the typefaces, editing glyph outlines, and testing of development versions.

Describing the design of children’s books: an analytical approach

Descriptions of graphic language are relatively rare compared to descriptions of spoken language. This paper presents an analytical approach to studying the visual attributes and conventions in children’s reading and information books. The approach comprises development of a checklist to record ‘features’ of visual organization, such as those relevant to typography and layout, illustration and the material qualities of the books, and consideration of the contextual factors that influence the ways that features have been organized or treated. The contextual factors particularly relevant to children’s reading include educational policy, legibility and vision research and typeface development and availability. The approach to analysis and description is illustrated with examples of children’s reading and information books from the Typographic Design for Children database, which also demonstrates an application of the checklist approach.

Do designers show categorical perception of typefaces?

Readers need to easily discriminate between different letters, so typefaces are designed to make these differences distinctive. But there is also a uniformity of style within a typeface. These styles are recognised by typographic designers and may be categorised to enable more efficient discrimination among typefaces. The manner in which designers perceive typefaces is explored using the paradigm of Categorical Perception (CP). A continuum of fonts is created by interpolating between two typefaces and two tasks (identification and discrimination) are used to test for CP. As the application of CP to typefaces is a new approach, various methodological issues are pursued. The experiments reveal that the conditions required to demonstrate CP are quite specific and CP was only evident in Times and Helvetica and not Garamond and Bodoni. Possible reasons for this difference are the characteristics of the two typefaces and their context of use. Speculation as to the purpose of CP in non-designers raises the under-researched question of how we identify letters in different typefaces when reading.

Characterizing typographic expertise: do we process typefaces like faces?

Studies of face recognition and discrimination provide a rich source of data and debate on the nature of their processing, in particular through using inverted faces. This study draws parallels between the features of typefaces and faces, as letters share a basic configuration, regardless of typeface, that could be seen as similar to faces. Typeface discrimination is compared using paragraphs of upright letters and inverted letters at three viewing durations. Based on previously reported effects of expertise, the prediction that designers would be less accurate when letters are inverted, whereas nondesigners would have similar performance in both orientations, was confirmed. A proposal is made as to which spatial relations between typeface components constitute holistic and configural processing, posited as the basis for better discrimination of the typefaces of upright letters. Such processing may characterize designers’ perceptual abilities, acquired through training.

Brill Greek, Adobe Arno Pro, Adobe Text/Brevier Greek typefaces

Typeface design: a series of collaborative projects commissioned by Adobe, Inc. and Brill to develop extensive polytonic Greek typefaces. The two Adobe typefaces can be seen as extension of previous research for the Garamond Premier Pro family (2005), and concludes a research theme started in 1998 with work for Adobe’s Minion Pro Greek. These typefaces together define the state of the art for text-intensive Greek typesetting for wide character set texts (from classical texts, to poetry, to essays, to prose). They serve both as exemplar for other developers, and as vehicles for developing the potential of Greek text typography, for example with the parallel inclusion of monotonic and polytonic characters, detailed localised punctuation options, fluid handling of case-conversion issues, and innovative options such as accented small caps (originally requested by bibliographers, and subsequently rolled out to a general user base). The Brill typeface (for the established academic publisher) has an exceptionally wide character set to cover several academic disciplines, and is intended to differentiate sufficiently from its partner Latin typeface, while maintaining a clear texture in both offset and low-resolution print-on-demand reproduction. This work involved substantial amounts of testing and modifying the design, especially of diacritics, to maintain clarity the readability of unfamiliar words. All together these typefaces form a study in how Greek typesetting meets contemporary typographic requirements, while resonating with historically accurate styles, where these are present. Significant research in printing archives helped to identify appropriate styles, as well as originate variants that are coherent stylistically, even when historical equivalents were absent.