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If you’re still looking for design or construction constraints, take a look at TypeCooker. It just randomly outputs a bunch of parameters. It can also be a fun lettering exercise to sketch based on the output. 

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Alphasketch: Spaceman

Another sweet alphabet by Savannah.

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Alphasketch: Jackalope

This week’s Alphasketch brought to you by our awesome new intern, Savannah Julian. 

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The New FF Chartwell

At long last, the new FF Chartwell has been released! Four new styles of graphs now accompany the family. The fonts have been released through the FontFont foundry; you may have noticed the FF prefixed to the name. It is a great honor to have worked with their awesome and experienced team.

The transition to FontFont brings a new EULA. The biggest change is that webfont licenses are no longer available. All previous licenses are still valid, and support will continue to be provided. You can still access the old documentation here. 

There are no immediate plans to release the new designs as webfonts, but that could change depending on demand or more elegant solutions. If you'd like to see webfonts come back, make sure to let FontFont know. 

The new fonts also feature a revised alphabet and beefed up character set for wider language support. Previous users should also note that the charts are now activated by Stylistic Slternates and Stylistic Set 1, rather than the ligature feature. 

How to use FF Chartwell Buy FF Chartwell

(image courtesy of FontFont)

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Interpolated Nudge for RoboFont

Update: Jackson Cavanaugh(Okay Type) brought this into his Ted-Nudget script. With that, you can access the nudge by using the normal arrow keys. The Script

Also, Gustavo Ferreira(Hipertipo) added a palette/dialog box, if that's more your style of working. The Script | Overview Video.

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A few years ago Christian Robertson of Betatype created the awesome Interpolated Nudge script for FontLab. Below is my adaptation of that script for RoboFont. 

To install: 1. Download the files. 2. Place unzipped files into your scripts RoboFont scripts folder. You can change the default scripts folder in the preferences menu. 

3. Select your nodes and call the script.

Or assign Hot Keys. Note that RoboFont automatically assigns 'control command' to the beginning of your hot keys.

  For more details on the script visit Christian's site.

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Preview of Chartwell Radar

Another new design for the upcoming polar collection. I'm also throwing around the possibility of including the grid in the font, and adding it to other designs where appropriate. It's activated as a separate parameter, and includes different threshold options.

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Another Chartwell style in progress

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New Lettering for Our Studio Door

Also featuring a new serif typeface in the works.

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Alphasketch: Astrodoni

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More Chartwell Examples

A few, more practical, examples of Chartwell, courtesy of Lizy.

Data is not factual!

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Alphasketch: Perspective

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Alphasketch: Chiseled

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In Progress

New style of Chartwell in the works.

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Alphasketch New Orleans

As I'm sure you know, typeface design is an insanely long process. Often an urge will come over me to make something quickly, just for the sake of progress. A creation that breaks free of any consequences or expectations.

So this, my new semi-regular posting category, aims to satisfy that hunger. The results will be crude. Some may eventually turn into typefaces, but most will never make it past the original post. 

I'll start this off with an alphabet inspired by New Orleans, and a letter 'J' that was featured in Kenneth Jones' talk on QSL Cards at Typecon.

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Chartwell for the Web is Here!

You can now use Chartwell to create graphs on the web! All licenses come with webfonts* and a javascript plugin enabling support in all browsers that can handle @font-face declarations. 

Live Demo Documentation Browser Samples

If you purchased a license the first time around, you can upgrade with a full discount of your order here.

*These fonts have not been manually TT hinted, mainly due to the sheer number of glyphs. However, for lack of a better term, since a number of tweaks to the glyph metrics and naming required to enable maximum browser support, 'webfont' is the only descriptor that felt mildly appropriate. Check the browser samples for rendering performance. 

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A Not-So-Brief Explanation of Chartwell

The underlying architecture of Chartwell revolves around ligature substitutions. Most typefaces use ligatures to prevent glyphs from crashing into each other. A simple swap code looks something like:

sub f i by f_i;

So, whenever an "f" appears next to an "i", the two get swapped out with a pre-drawn "f_i" glyph.

Bars

Bars only uses these basic swaps as described above. Its structure works something like this:

sub two three by twentythree;

When "2" and "3" appear next to each other, swap with the "twentythree" glyph that has been drawn to be 23 times as long as the "1" glyph. It's important to remember that a glyph can be drawn with any vector shape. We aren't limited to letters! 

From here, all we have to do is cycle through the glyph combinations from 1-1,000—the limit I chose for this style—and swap with the corresponding glyphs.

Another thing to note is the negative sidebearings—the space on either side of a glyph. If a glyph is given a left sidebearing of -100 units, it will be positioned 100 units to the left of where the previous glyph ends. These negative sidebearings eliminate the gap that occurs from the indented shape of each glyph.

The pluses serve no purpose other than to make sure values don't accidentally get interpreted as one. If the example above were written "233635" it would be interpreted as "233 635 51." If spaces were used, instead of pluses, the values would render correctly, but there would be a space in between each. When ligatures are turned on, the pluses get swapped with empty glyphs, keeping them out of the way.

Pies

In Pies, we also start with a straight swap.

Now we need to chain the values together. It's not possible to rotate a glyph using OpenType. To get around this, all possibilities had to be drawn, and exist as separate glyphs. (i.e. The "1" wedge has 100 variations, each rotated 1% further than the previous. The "25" wedge has 75 glyphs, and so on. 

Next, the previous glyph must be detected, so we know how far to "rotate" the current glyph. For this, we can make use of OpenType contextual substitutions. The code looks something like this:

sub twentythree.zero plus thirtysix.zero' by thirty.twenty; 

The ' mark allows us to designate which glyph will be swapped. So in this case, "thirtysix.zero" will only be swapped when it is preceded by "twentythree.zero plus". It is then replaced by a 36% wedge that has been rotated by 23%.

Taking this further:

sub thirtysix.twentythree plus fourtyone.zero' by fourtyone.fiftynine;

Since the "36" glyph is starting at 23%, it will end at 59%. When a "41" follows in this context, it gets swapped with a "41" rotated 59%. From here it's just a layering of this concept to take care of all possibilities.

It gets complex fast though. There are up to 99 possible starting points for each value. To help keep the code under control, OpenType allows us to make classes, or groups of glyphs, that we can swap out in one bang. 

As I mentioned earlier, each value has been rotated for each possible starting point. Each glyph that starts at 0% has been grouped into the "@zero" class. Each glyph that starts at 1% has been grouped into the "@one" class, and so on.

Then glyphs are also organized by where their ending point is. So "40" starting at "0", and "39" starting at "1", will belong to the "@fourty_end" class.

To swap out all possible combinations that start at 40% we can use this code:

sub @fourty_end plus @zero' by @fourty; 

"@fourty_end" contains all values from 1-40, that in combination with their starting point, add up to 40%.  "@zero" contains all values from 1-100 that have not been rotated.

"@fourty" contains all values from 1-60 that have been rotated to start at 40%.  

From here it's just a matter of cycling through all the different starting classes.

To finish it off, all rotated wedges have a negative sidebearing, which centers them over the first glyph.

Lines

Lines loosely follows the same logic. First, it does a straight swap of the values, resulting in something that looks like a vertical bar graph.

The previous values must then be detected. Again, the code looks pretty similar toPies:

sub twentythree plus thirtysix' by @thirtysix_eightyone; 

The "36" gets subbed out by a glyph that has the front point pulled down to the height of 36. Each value has a pre-drawn glyph connecting to each of the possible starting points from 0–100.

A tricky thing presented by this design is what to do with the first value, since it has no previous point to connect to. There were three options as I saw it.

1. Do nothing, and let the flat bar value exist for the first glyph. Obviously this creates an unnecessary glyph, and extra point along the graph.

2. Start all values at zero (or some other arbitrary number). Again, this didn't seem right, because not all data starts at zero.

3. Only use the first value as a starting point. So it's value wouldn't be visible until a second value was chained to it. This felt the most accurate, allowing you to choose your starting point. This way the values are treated more like points along a line, rather than solid blocks. 

Generating the Glyphs

Because of the sheer number of glyphs in each style—Lines alone has over 10,000—an automated production method needed to be developed. Lines and Bars are fairly simple, and calculable shapes. Because of this, I was able to auto-generate the glyphs, using Robofab python framework. 

Pies was a bit more of a challenge because of the round shapes. Once each of the 100 sized wedges were drawn, action sets were created in FontLab for rotating and positioning the glyphs.

Because of the somewhat primitive nature of OpenType language, some of the code got a little lengthy. To help cut down on errors, and an effort to preserve my sanity, I wrote a few javascript functions to output some of the OpenType feature code. 

Useful Resources

I Love Typography, OpenType How To  I Love Typography, Engaging Contextuality by Nick Shinn  Adobe's OpenType Resource Typotheque OpenType Feature Support Chart RoboFab

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Felt the urge to draw some letters

BEFORE·SPACES·INTERPUNCTS·WERE·USED·TO·GROUP·AND·SEPARATE·WORDS

Wikipedia