On Logotype Calibration

0. Introduction

So, yeah, I’m a type designer. And there are numerous situations where I end up stating that “I make fonts”, so that people can have an idea about what I do for a living.

But drawing letters and packing them into working fonts is just a slice of it: I very often find myself fixing other peoples designs. And while it might seem obvious that I would be fixing other people’s typefaces (it has happened on ocasion, though, but when other type designers ask me to help them it gets closer to a mentorship than me doing the designing work), I end up doing logotype calibrations.

1. Logotype Calibration?

Isn’t it just redesign?

“Just”. As if redesigning isn’t a lot of work. But then again, what is logotype calibration, anyway?

Imagine this situation: you’re working in a branding project and, as such, you end up with a logotype. But something’s off — the form is wonky, it doesn’t work with the typefaces you use, it doesn’t survive small sizes and so on — this is where I usually come in.

If you want to check out the process, here’s a video where I go through most of the process of calibrating a logotype (size-specific calibrations were discarded here):

Note: Thanks to Both Bou for agreeing on letting me use his work for the video!

2. When Do I Need My Logotype Calibrated?

Always.

— Yeah, alright, Fábio, nice self-promotion move. [sarcasm]
— Thanks. [sarcasm]

But seriously, always. Or better, there’s only one situation when you don’t need your logotype calibrated: when you don’t have one.

And this doesn’t mean you need to hire someone to do that gig for you: with practise, knowledge and time, anyone can make an impeccable job.

Still, let’s suppose that you’re hiring someone to do that for you. When should you call them on board? There are two optimal situations that makes this smooth sailing:

1. Your logo is done, but could be better and you don’t know how nor why;
2. You need to fine-tune it to several applications (sizes, media and such).

3. Not My Logo

I’m a strong believer that, in this type of gig, I have to respect the designer/studio’s work and take it as not being my own. Any alteration has to be done within reason and not by whim:

• I’m looking at the visually applied results of a brand strategy, not at the brand strategy itself;
• The designer/studio has it own pipeline and process and I shouldn’t interfere with that (a small detail change can hijack and stall the whole branding project);
• It’s a calibration job, not a logotype design job.

Although I take some liberties, the need to respect what was given to me is always in the back of my mind. I don’t want to be creative about it, someone already has done that.

The thing is that someone is trusting me their months-long work to make it better. Someone has put a lot of care into this, probably has time and budget constraints and this is, most likely, a tiny (but very central) fragment of a much larger project.

4. Fine-tunning Form

Form is the singlemost important element in Design.

We need to adapt forms to whatever use and perceptual situation we decide to. So, though it seems like I’m stating the obvious, the whole process of calibration is form correction and/or optimization.

Since examples work great, here’s a mini case study: the Swedish studio Identity Works! hired me to correct a logotype for Hotel At Six, in Stockholm — which led to a custom typeface, but that’s a story for some other time —, where the first step was to correct the form and composition in general, fixing curve smoothness, intersections, spacing, stroke width and some other minor details. Have a look:

As you can see from the image above, they sent me a pretty well developed logotype that pretty close to what it should be.

Still, there was a back-and-forth discussion with the project’s Art Director (props to Nuno Coelho, he was always so nice and dilligent), testing versions of small details, a lot of time spent looking through a magnifying lens and a completely non-eco-friendly waste of paper.

So, the first step was to strive for a harmonious shape, with the concern of making it to visually flow smoothly. The most obvious detail is the t‘s bottom-most part, that was too shy in the original. But, for example, the S was too lumpy, out of being too geometric:

The greater amount of time in the development of this project was to get the inktraps just right. Gladly, this was a size-specific design and I could test the final media with satisfactory accuracy, so the stroke widths, intersections and curves were tweaked until I couldn’t make it better. The result was this assymetrical beauty:

Working with such thin lines, on the threshold of being ignored by the rasterizer, is a challenge. It’s, in fact, a crash-course on microtweaking, where 1/1000 nudges make a difference. Stroke modulation (yes, it has modulation) has to be perfect, since any difference in tension surfaces immediatly. Visual mass is so little that is unforgiving — which means this project was really fun for me.

5. Applications

In a branding strategy, a logotype can appear in a wide array of media and sizes, through a wide array of processes. Digital and print are vague terms that encapsulate formats, rasterizers, printing methods, papers, software, screens and so on. The list is endless.

To predeterminate as much of these as possible and to deliver context-specific solutions is key to making logotype calibrations. And there will always be variation, always.

Trying to achieve perfect consistency in applications is to aspire to make order out of chaos. Still, this is the goal.

And, in spite of all the technical constraints and real-world entropy — and with the notion that flawlessness is a myth —, any approximation is welcome.

A logotype is a set of graphic pieces, each one of them context-specific.

6. Conclusion

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article! If so, please share it with your folks!

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And if you’re wondering about talking to me about it, you can always say hi!

Until next time!

Finding Fonts – A Guide

0. Introduction

What typeface should I use?

I’ve lost track of how many times I get this asked. Probably twice a week, maybe more. Even in projects where I work as a consultant, this question is usually the first step — even with amazingly skilled graphic designers. Heck, when Michael Paul Young asked me to collaborate at YWFT‘s blog, this was the subject.

Whether a simple desire for novelty, a frustration of what they’re using is just not quite right or a total lack of sense of direction, this always, always gets asked. And it’s not out of inexperience or incapacity (you can relax, now): there’s a wide offer of typefaces, nowadays, as well as a high demand of visual singularity and novelty, where typography is in a all-time spotlight.

Sure, there’s more pressure, these days. Massimo Vignelli’s idea that you can get around with just five or so typefaces to all your projects is a very dated one — from a time where the offer wasn’t wide, either in quantity as in quality. I’d say it’s intellectually lazy, coming from a Modernist hegemonic standpoint. Still, this idea had its era.

But, at the same time, there are solutions. It was never this easy to find new typefaces, and font production technology has significantly improved since digital type’s dawn. Also, media have improved significantly, where resolution is becoming less of a problem, books are in their golden era (quality wise, I’m not talking about economics), what we can now do with the web is less and less archaic and the list goes on.

For the reasons above (and because the overwhelming majority of people in the mailinglist asked me to), I’ve decided to put up this little guide on how to find the typeface your looking for. Alright, let’s get this going.

1. Why Are You Concerned About It?

Wait, what? Come on, Fábio! After that introduction? Yeah. I mean, why are you really concerned about it? Font selection is mostly a decision-making process and, for that, you need specific problems.

So, this is usually my first question, or something along these lines. And I like to start here, because I want to know at what level people are feeling stuck. The replies go from I don’t know where to look to this one sort of works, I just don’t like the terminals. As you can imagine, the approaches to these two differ wildly.

But the most usual reason, from my experience, is that people have no idea about what to do, no research was done. They have no idea about how the project will look and feel. Or they’re just emotionally overwhelmed, daydreaming about and epiphany that will spare them from the lengthy process of finding the right typeface.

As a summary, ask yourself why: it’ll tell you what to tackle first and, most likely, the very core of your project needs.

2. Know Your Brief

A graphic composition is a sum of graphic components who mutually influence eachother. And this is highly quotable. Probably it was Einstein who said it.

As such, I think that it’s not relevant whether you start, you have to start somewhere. Still, having a good brief, one that gives you direction and keeps you from derailing, is paramount.

This brief should also help you a big deal when it comes to chosing a typeface (or more) for your project: it’ll give you your target market, the overall vibe of the project, the project goals, the current problems to solve, the scope of the applications and so on. You know the drill.

But having this beforehand — and I can’t stress this enough — is mandatory. Not that someone who is consulting for you as a type expert won’t help you to get, but this person won’t do it magically: if you don’t ask yourself these questions, someone will: or the project is set to fail, big time.

Hence, the more problems you have, the more constraints you have, the better. Seriously. This will help you tremendously down the road, when it comes to do binary decisions.

3. What Kind Of Vibe Are You Looking For?

This is probably the first question, after having your brief. Skip the latter and, all of a sudden, you’re elaborating it: I mean, you can’t really skip the brief; one way or another, you’ll have to do it, or redo it.

The whole process of typeface selection involves a lot of guessing, so we want to make it as educated as we possibly can. So when you ask yourself this question, it should be somewhat obvious. And what I mean by obvious isn’t something as a 16th century Dutch with baroque italics (although it’s as valid as anything else, since everybody thinks differently), but more of an emotional tone.

What we want here is to start broad and funnel down to as little options we can. But at this stage, the feeling we want people to have while reading already chops a sea of typefaces in more than half.

Think of typefaces as a subtle visual cue that should act as an emotional reinforcement to the trance-like state that happens while reading.

I mean, the experience of reading, lengthy or brief, is some sort of assisted hallucination, where we internally emulate the discourse someone wrote. So, as a hypnotist of sorts, we want to associate that experience with a set of emotions, and we do this by the visual choices we do, not just with type.

So, if we’re aiming for something that feels serious, professional, respectful and trustworthy, we’re not choosing Comic Sans, are we? (And no, Internet, I don’t hate Comic Sans. It’s beautifully made.)

4. A Needle In A Haystack

How do we find a needle in a haystack? With a fucking big magnet.

Now that you have your set of feelings and emotions (I know how it sounds, thank you), you probably have some idea on how to translate these visually. This is where your research stage kicks in.

Diogo, a graphic designer friend, has an hilarious expression for when, in a project, one has too many options and is trying to figure out what to decide: swimming in mayonaise. I’ll spare you the physics of trying to swim in a non-Newtonian fluid, but you get the idea.

There are a lot of options. And this is good, although it can feel overwhelming. So, try to amass potential candidates, leaving out what doesn’t fit the tone of the project (even if you really like that new typeface).

Start with a big chunk of typefaces. And then, exclude, exclude, exclude. This initial stage consists in leaving out the ones that, at first glance, the ones that do not serve your project’s vibe.

But how do you know what kind of typeface serves certain vibes? Well, tough question, tough answers. You’ll have to trust and train your gut: the more experience you have, the more sensitive to subtleties your intuition is. Not the most charming and life-changing answer, but hey, it’s the truth and it works.

Still, you don’t have to be a ultra-geek of type anatomy. Some knowledge helps, sure, since those little feet refering to serifs might not be a tag in a font search engine; but being fairly educated in type classification will help you a lot. Go to a font retailer and check how foundries have tagged their typefaces. Chances are, most of them have highly subjective/emotional tags, hence the whole vibe talk above.

But the most important thing is to have an idea of what you want, and let that guide you.

5. Survival Of The Fittest – The Process, Tech & Paper Shredders

In practical terms, here’s the process: you get your brief, set your tone, have an idea of what you want and you start looking for it. You get a fuck ton of options, and you start reducing that amount by quick elemination. So, let’s say you end up with 20 candidates (this seems like the mid-range scenario, to me); so, what’s next?

Testing, my dear friend, testing.

Print them all (or make digital mockups if it’s for screen, or anything else that is closer to your final medium), see if they fit with the rest of your visual elements, see if they perform on the size you want (assuming that you know that type isn’t drawn the same way for every size). If not, toss them out of the list, thus reducing it.

Over time, the more you have worked with typefaces, stress-testing them constantly, the more you’ll have a sophisticated hunch of what works or not. For me, while interacting with Graphic Designers and Art Directors, this is the biggest tell on how experienced they are: they say stuff like something close to Arnhem, but with a bigger x-height, a bit wider and teardrop terminals instead a fancy, classic but contemporary serif for small sizes.

The mindset to adopt while excluding cases is to be over-critical. And that’s why good designers fail to have a lot of matches on Tinder. With this said, exclude options at the slightest doubt: you can always get back to them, and it makes choosing manageable. When it looks good and feels good, well, it’s good.

So, the only way to do this fast is not to skip it. In time, you’ll be faster; once your visual type culture and experience has expanded.

6. Where’s the Haystack?

Right. The amount of channels in the industry is growing exponentially: more and more foundries are offering typefaces outside of resellers, if not stepping away from them completely.

So, yes, you’ll have to widen the number of channels where you search for typefaces, and you’ll also have to curate them.

Resellers are still an excellent way to search for fonts (with some more picky on the quality of typefaces they sell than others), since they have a huge database of stuff and decent searching tools.

In addition to this, be sure to follow some typedesigners and/or foundries who’s work you admire. Especially when it comes to pairing typefaces: it’s common for foundries to release typefaces that work well together, as well as, due to personal style, there’s usually something familiar between type families.

7. Font Pairing 101

Since we’re on it, we should talk a bit about font pairing.

The Internet is crowded with decent articles on this, so I’ll concentrating on the stuff you shouldn’t be paying attention. Maybe in another article, perhaps?

For starters, forget about pairing lists, especially if they don’t tell you why two given typefaces work together. These will keep you ignorant and won’t help you next time you have to solve a similar problem.

With this, I’m not saying these are useless. Typewolf‘s collection, for example, is absolutely stellar, and it’s database of pairings is enourmous. Still, it doesn’t pretend to give you suggestions nor “definitive pairings”: it simply shows you want people are selecting, in a very tasteful curation; if you want to expand your visual culture in type pairing, go there. Seriously.

Font pairing usually deals with factors as style contrast or similarity, vertical proportions (not vertical metrics, since you can adjust those), texture’s colour, construction and so on. The best advice I can give for now (since this subject deserves a separate article) is go and read about how type designers make superfamilies, while also checking for patterns with font pairings.

8. Wrapping Up

I hope you found something useful in this article. Again, this is my view on the selection process, and there’s room for a lot of funk when it comes to this.

Hence, I’d like to encourage you to try stuff out and see what resonates with you, without being accritical. If you want to be good at this, learn as much as you can about type, while putting ideas to test.

For more articles, new releases and random stuff about type, be sure to subscribe in the form below, or follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Happy stalking!

5 Typography Tips, From a Type Designer’s Point of View

It’s been some time!

To take some time off the oh-so-many huge projects in the making and craft something for you that’s worth your while, today we’ll be talking about some typography tricks that I find helpful and that I haven’t seen anywhere or that I’ve found the information available unsatisfying.

Another plus for you, some of these came out of designing type, i.e., out of looking constantly at type at a micro level.

So, while I’m satisfying my inner megalomaniac, here’s a small post of some things I’ve learned along the way.

1. Contrast Too High?

This one has a story.

While I was waiting for a meeting at We Came From Space, my curiosity won me over and I had a peek at what Joana Sobral, from one of the studios there, Non-Verbal Club, was doing. She was designing a newspaper and was having trouble with the body typeface.

The typeface was Hercules, set in a very small point. The copy was gigantic, the line-spacing as tight as it could be and the thinner parts of the typeface would simply disappear under 8 points (the point size was 7.5 points).

A bit after I told her “that cut clearly wasn’t designed for such a small size”, it hit me: if a really thin stroke was added around the letterform (in that case, it was something like a 0.05 point stroke), it might do the trick. And it did, along with a slight increase in the tracking to compensate the x-axis growth.

You see, typefaces are designed for a specific size (or, at least, they should). When drawing for small sizes, one of the good practises is to decrease contrast. Other things should be also done, but we were looking for a quick and dirty solution on the spot.

The addition of such a thin outline wouldn’t compromise counters, it would just steal some white space (solvable with the loosening of tracking) and rescue those vanished thin lines.

2. x-Height and Weight (Pairing)

“When pairing typefaces, adjust the size to match the x-heights”.

This is a good advice, but incomplete: it does not consider weight. But let me explain this from another perspective:

The lighter the type, the taller it seems; so, bold cuts are designed a bit larger than their lighter counterparts, to compensate for that optical illusion. Have a look:

So, when pairing typefaces, we should do the same as above. As an example, here’s Minion Pro Regular paired with Futura Bold, first with the same exact x-height, and second with the correction:

3. When Possible, Tint Your Black

When I was starting out as a graphic designer, I had the privilege of working with a printing house composed of a handful of old guys. It was a very small print shop with a lot of old-school machines.

But the better part was the people. They had years and years of manual printing, lots of metal type blocks, a letterpress in the corner, a rusty inoperative Linotype in the backyard and a kind and patient heart to deal with my curiosity.

I’ve learned a big deal with them: they gave me free reign to test everything, while suggesting me small alterations to improve the works in hand.

One of the most precious teachings I got from them was to compensate the text colour with the paper colour, which one can easily extrapolate to other mediums.

3.1 Printing

The principle is simple: if you have a coldish background (paper colour), add a bit of a warm colour to your black. If the background is warmer, add a cold colour. Simple.

What it does is that it improves the silhouette of the letters, sharpening the text, by colour contrast.

Be aware that this only works with direct colour; do not use it by mixing multiple colours, use a dedicated spot color for this instead. So, if you’re printing in offset, only use one composite layer for this, or the overprint will make your text blurry.

3.2 The Screens

The same principal can be applied to screens. I never use pure white or pure black on a screen, and it has its perks:

• No White Burning, No Black Staining: I find the pure white/black combo quite aggressive on screens. When I worked in television, I had the opportunity to colour test a lot of television sets (from plasmas to CRTs, LEDs and the state-of-the-art OLEDs, back then), and one of the first things I did was to test how much they could handle the whites without burning, as well as how much black could you go before shutting the pixels completely.
• Better colour harmony: Using a bit of colour to something apparently monotone gives a more tactile, natural-like feel to the design.
• Sharpening of letters: Like in print, it improves the silhouette, adding clarity to the texture.
• Increased viewing angle: Specially in LED and OLED monitors, not burning the whites and keeping the blacks from staining increases the monitors viewing angle, when it comes to text.

4. Tracking and Size

Default values are not sacred.

I’ve read so many times do not use optical kerning! that is pointless to think that you use it. But the truth is: sometimes you have to (to get closer to a desirable result, you should not take it for face value).

Sure, type designers spend a lot of time around metrics and kerning, to the point of being the most usual complaint in our métier. But expecting to fire up a DTP software, pasting a text and choosing a typeface with no further adjustment is naïve.

Back on track: as we discussed in §1, typefaces are designed for a specific size. And apart from other formal considerations and adjustments, tracking and kerning is also size-specific.

If you’ve already read On Legibility – In Typography And Type Design, this isn’t new to you: if we consider a “medium” point size as our size reference, the bigger the size, the tighter the tracking. And as type size shrinks, tracking should grow.

There are two reasons for this: one perceptual, another one technical:

• Perceptual: The actual physical amount of white space varies according to size. It’s easier to recognize a silhouette when it’s big than when it’s small, so adding white space between glyphs when they’re tiny improves that silhouette-reading process. When it’s big, as long as you retain some white space around the letterform, it will still be recognizable without much deciphering.
• Technical: Not everyone has 20/20 vision (ah, those times!), printers aren’t perfect, screens aren’t perfect. These factors, among others, make the tracking issue, specially at small sizes, paramount. Someone who deals with typography, has to think and deal with deterioration and bad reading conditions, whether is low resolution, ink spreading or a bad rasterizer.

As I’ve mentioned in the readability and legibility article, a good test for deterioration is the Gaussian Blur / Threshold one. Have a look:

5. Justification, Hyphenation and Other Fairy Tales

Composing a block of text isn’t a straightforward nor simple task. There are a lot of factors to consider (mediums, resolution, letter size, leading, paragraph navigation, microtypography, rags, widows and more) as well as technical limitations.

Every solution is, therefore, object(piece)-specific.

With that said, you can imagine my expression when I read/hear people say to never justify text, because font metrics are sacred. Or when I bump into a website with justified paragraph text.

Don’t get me wrong: these scenarios are possible to pull off in an impeccable way; I just find disrespectful to the craft of typography and centuries of test-and-try knowledge.

Let’s get to the point: justification is a matter of navigation, more than a matter of style.

5.1 Justified Text

This is a book style classic, because it’s the most versatile and economic way to compose text. And also the hardest.

The beauty of justified text is that, regarding composition, is a very stable form that relates to the page format and, in a glance, it tells you when a paragraph starts and when a paragraph ends.

The problem is (and I believe this is the reason why some people bluntly tell others not to do this) that it takes time, effort and knowledge.

In order to achieve a good texture with justified text you need to pay attention to hyphenation, rivers, line-breaks, optical margin balance, widows and orphans, line number and text flow: all of this means you’ll find yourself doing letter-by-letter micro adjustments very often.

Note: The reason why I strongly discourage justified text on the web is due to the lack of control you have, specially regarding hyphenation. Sure, there’s manual hyphenation in CSS (and the auto feature is a no-go), you never know if the text block width will remain the same, with responsive sites. So, better safe than sorry.

5.2 Side Aligned Text And Rags

The nice thing about left aligned text is that the only thing that you have to control in the texture is your right rag, so the micro editing consists in line breaks. It also makes the text block a bit more dynamic.

But, as you can see in the image above, when scanning through the right margin, you don’t have any clue on where the paragraph ends (and the next one starts), specially if the last line of the paragraph is a longer one. One actually has to find a period and check the identation of the next line to now if one is dealing with a paragraph or not.

A solution for this is to separate each paragraph with a margin, as you can see below:

This has become the de facto standard for the web, but by doing this you loose a third level of hierarchy in the text, where you could divide the paragraphs by groups, for some reason. Sure, you can add marks – and in the web is a good solution, since there’s no constraint about how much vertical space you can use -, but when you have physical constraints, such as in a book (page count, line count), this can become a problem.

In the image above, you can see an example of when a paragraph ends a line above of where it should, if line count is desired to be respected.

6. Conclusion

I hope you found these tips as valuable as I do!

If you did, please be so kind to share it among those you think that will enjoy this too!

For more goodness, subscribe in the form below!

Cheers from Portugal!

Typecooking: Why I Started Doing Daily Exercises

Edit: Since the release of this article, a couple of things changed: the project is now called Typerobics and it has a dedicated microsite!

If you’ve been paying attention to my Facebook or Twitter feeds (or even Behance, but not as much up-to-date), you’ve certainly noticed that I’ve been posting a custom lettered word (almost) daily.

And people have been asking why I started doing so, and this article is about just that.

0. Introduction

OK, first things first: before I tell you why, let me tell you how I ended up doing it.

This is a shameless copy of an idea. Not that it’s something new, since daily exercises are as old as art. But to be clear, Oscar Guerrero Cañizares, the super talented man behind Sumotype Foundry (profile here) has been doing it for a long time; and I’ve been checking his stuff for an equivalent while.

So, if you’re expect an incredibly interesting story, worthy of a novel, here you go: I asked him if I could copy the idea and he said yes.

This introductory story serves two purposes: first of all, check his work, since he’s a skilled type designer and a very nice guy, out of our interactions. Second, Oscar, thank you!

People have also been asking how to I pick the words and how do I get a briefing:

1. Word picking: I use this random word generator, and sometimes, if I get stuck, I cheat with this Scrabble solver. Since I try to keep every exercise down from 40 minutes (unless I’m trying out a style that I’m not comfortable with), so I end up cheating. There you go: I’m human.
2. Briefing: This wildly varies, but I can reduce this to two paths: either I use TypeCooker to randomly generate a briefing (hence the name) or I draw whatever I want to.

With this cleared out, let’s onto the whys, meaning, the reason of this article.

1. Improving Fast vs. Font Development Takes An Awful Long Time

For me, this is the main reason. Font developing is so time consuming (some times it takes years to develop a family [I’ve lost count of how many times I redesigned something, just to get it right]), that it makes the process of exploring letterforms incredibly slow. Sure, you have to make a lot of fonts to tackle and learn about font tech issues, but the drawing process (technically speaking) isn’t that complex at all: Bézier curves, metrics and kerning.

Understanding form and becoming dexterous with it, however, it’s a whole different league; and we only improve that by constantly drawing, specially with variety.

Font developing may stall you from improving your formal skills, since you get to focus on the same thing for ages. In these exercises it’s just a word, not a gazillion glyphs across a myriad of axis, and you’re adapting your brain to formal and spacing skills in a variety of different shapes.

And, when you go back to font development, you get blazing fast at the drawing part (which is most of it, really), since you’ve solved some routine problems while practising, as well as improved your drawing technique.

2. Developing The Inner Do-It-All

This comes in the sequence of the previous section. As type designer or letterer, you want to tame as many styles as you can: you never know what people will ask you, right? Besides, how amazing would it be to sit down and confidently draw anything that comes to mind? Well, that comes with practice.

I try to challenge myself in these exercises. Whether with a style that I’m pretty bad at or by using a stop-watch, for example.

In Portugal, we have an expression for this: derusting the joints. If you’re not used to use your legs, the get rusted. So when you start using them again, it’s hard; but, in time and perseverance, it gets easier and easier – by moving, you scrap the rust out of your joints. Metaphorically, you only develop a skill by doing it over and over again, but you need that initial push before it gets easy.

3. Cheat, cheat, cheat

Oh, the pleasure of cheating! Lazy people, rejoice!

Joking aside, cheating is actually very useful. While developing a font family, the perfectionism light is on all the time. And this puts you (well, at least me) in a mental state where you’re over-concerned about… everything. Apart from taking some of the pleasure away, this hyper-focus refrains you from thinking out of the box, and so, from actually finding a simpler solution to the problem.

And the repetition involved in a huge amount of glyphs contributes to this.

4. Sharing Dumbness Is A Good Way To Get Schooled

Of course, these quick drawings have flaws. And when you post what you’ve done, people will pinpoint those flaws. Scary? Nope. Great? You bet.

By sharing with others, people will guide you on where to look and, with luck, what to do. I like to think that whatever I’m having a problem with, someone has already solved it; so sharing and letting people see what you do, even if it’s just an exercise, you’re actually putting yourself available to learn and improve, by the help of others.

As you saw above (and if you checked the Youtube channel) I also did some process videos (more will come, keep an eye out!). Aside from the compliments (these are great, don’t get me wrong), the constructive critiques are actually the best part, even if people think that you’re being dumb.

Well, if they think so, they’re probably right. But this can be a good thing, since a lot of people who think you’re dumb try to prove that you’re being dumb, which means that they’ll explain a easier way to do the same thing.

5. The Survival Of The Fittest Approach

Everyday, I get a started font.

One of the most frequent questions about my work is how I get ideas for typefaces. Well, I start a lot of them and, eventually, I end up wanting to develop one of the doodles/sketches into a full family.

Let’s say that 95% (or more) of what I’ve started will never end up as a ready-to-ship typeface. At the same time, I’ll never end up without something to pursue. And if the desire to finish stuff is the source of longevity, man, I’m immortal.

6. It Builds Your Portfolio, The Fast Way

This one is a no-brainer. In a week, you get 5 to 7 pieces of work to show. In a month, 20 to 30 (or 31. Or 28. Damn you, February!). In a year, 260 to 365. Do I need to say more?

7. It Builds Your Audience

The algorithm that sticks Facebook pages’ posts onto subscribers walls is terrible. Well, it’s awesome for Facebook, since I imagine that it’s a splendid source of revenue, but for someone who wants to see his own stuff seen by others, it’s terrible. Unless you pay for exposure, most (and with most I mean 99% of the people) of the people will only see it if they visit your page.

Since I started doing this thing, there are people of consistently come every day to check it out. And don’t get me wrong: they’re not friends of mine on Facebook.

And these people who come everyday (or very often) are your biggest asset in word-of-mouth. Heck, they’re becoming experts about what you do! So, who better to talk about your work?

By the way: guys, you spoil me everyday, I’m so grateful for such dedication, you guys are my motivators! Thank you, from the heart!

Soppiness aside, giving people something they value on a regular basis is the core of building a following. And having a following that respects what you do does several things:

• Keeps you motivated: because you know people expect something from you, while positively reinforcing you with their attention;
• Provide feedback: which, as we discussed in §4, can be a way to learn and develop skills;
• Validates you in the market: a prospecting client can easily find if you have a following. So, having the support of your peers is even better, since other people are actually telling that you know what you’re doing.

8. Prospecting Clients Have A Better Idea Of Your Skills

Simply because you have more to show, more recognition from your peers, in a wide variety of styles and, due to practise, better quality. What client doesn’t want this?

This can even work as a Pantone chart for letterists and type designers, but instead of colors, you get styles. And, the best part, is that you don’t even have to make mockups so your client knows what you’re talking about: it’s already done.

Prospecting clients have an immediate array of styles available to pick from, even before he decides to say a word to you. Win-win.

9. Wrapping Up

As you might have noticed, I’ve became a huge advocate of daily exercises. And although I wrote this through the lens of my own experience, these reasons and practises are extensible to other areas beyond type design and/or lettering.

I hope that you had a good time reading this and, if so, feel free to share the articles in the buttons below!

See you next article!

On Legibility – In Typography And Type Design

If you’re following me on Facebook, you probably know that I’ve recently asked for suggestions on what should I write about. Michał Jarociński suggested that I should do something about legibility, wayfinding and signage.

Curiously enough, not so long ago, I’ve started a thread on Typophile (and a discussion on Reddit’s Typography board) about the function/use of serifs, and, to my surprise, it escalated very quickly to a derby between serif and sans-serif type and which one was the most legible: but I’ll get back to you on this, in a bit.

But this led me to Kevin Larson, Microsoft’s researcher on reading, who was kind enough to exchange some e-mails with me, happily providing me some papers on the matter.

So, since you now know the path leading here, I hope provide you with some insightful knowledge about legibility — or what makes type more legible —, in order to help you improve your type designs (if you’re a type designer or letterer) or to help you refine your typeface selection process (if you’re a graphic designer).

And cabbages. Low in fat.

Without further ado, here’s the juice:

1. Letter, Word, Paragraph

First of all, it should be a no-brainer that, when we talk about rapid-letter recognition, there are multiple levels of the letters’ context (or, let’s say, relationship between other letters) that have an effect on how we recognize letter-forms.

So, as you might have wondered, a single letter should be recognized faster than one within a word. And its position in the word affects it’s recognition. And leading has an effect on this too.

Edit: Hrant Papazian has already provided some insights in my first article about Bézier Curves, and he did it again.

In spite of the previous statement, reading is a way more complex event than simple letter-by-letter construction. The bouma model suggests that we read through clusters of letters and only go through the letter-by-letter process in case of uncertainty.

I sympathize with this idea because it’s more economic, brain processing wise. To keep it simple, while reading, factors like grammar, word expectancy, word form and so on, are not to be excluded when we think about the reading experience.

*edit end* 

Keep also in mind that, by definition, legibility is not the same as readability, although, in practical terms, they are particular focus lenses of the same thing. We’ll talk primarily about legibility (the formal properties of a glyph that improve their instant recognition), but it would be a major fault not to mention readability issues (such as spacing, texture and so on).

Edit: This kind of research is still on its infancy, so keep in mind that these suggestions are a mix of what has been researched, empirical experience and my own opinions on the matter.

At the same time, the parallel-letterwise model that you can find in the third reference is still disputed, and very brightly, by Papazian, in Typo13.

*edit end* 

But how to improve this? Well, I’d like to talk about something else, first.

2. Familiarity

I have a memory of when I started tying my shoes, without an adult to help me out: I remember being the the kindergarten’s corridor, puzzled, trying to figure out how to do a neat bow and how the laces could make such form. It took me a while, I guess. I remember it as being a challenging task, since I was alone (yes, you could be alone in kindergarten, in the 80’s [well, at least here in Portugal]), and I was trying my best. I don’t even know if I’ve managed to do it properly, I just remember that I did something with it and that it filled me with proud.

Today, I don’t even remember when I tied my sneakers.

It’s part of our cognitive process to forget that we know how to do something: we end up just doing it without thinking. That’s why we can talk and write, for example, without a colossal effort to construct meaning, spelling, grammar and so on.

And the same applies to reading, i.e., recognizing letters. The more we are exposed to a certain typeface and the more we interact with it, the easier it is to rapidly recognize it.

I know this sounds like I’m stating the obvious, but consider the implications that this has on any study about legibility. Imagine gender differences on this matter. Cultural differences.

So, we should be very careful to engage extrapolations on legibility and readability, because this factor alone can sabotage our conclusions, so address this article (and others) with a critical mind.

Edit: Kevin Larson directed my attention to an issue regarding familiarity: even though we read best with typefaces we know best, we’ll do just fine at reading well-designed brand new typefaces. *edit end* 

But before you go and use Helvetica on everything from now on, please read along. *wink*

3. Spacing & Kerning

As was implied in §1, the amount of white space around to a letter influences it’s legibility, thus having an impact on readability.

But what effect? Well, if the tracking is too tight, letters will clutter and we might mistaken two or more character for another one; if too loose, we might have a hard time figuring out if a character is in a word or not.

Here, have a look:

As you can see in this example, in the first row, it wouldn’t be odd to mistaken the c and the l as being a d. And even by knowing that it’s the same word, probably you slowed down while reading the last line.

Spacing should be set to produce an even rhythm throughout the texture; altering this rhythm produces a reading experience similar to a ride in a car that has a choked engine, prone to hiccups.

3.1 Size-specific Spacing

Loosening the tracking slightly is not always a bad thing to do. In fact, in order to improve legibility and readability, it’s a good practice to open the tracking as you go down or/and if you’re working with very small resolutions.

Here’s a quick test to see how legibility survives deterioration: Gaussian Blur + Threshold.

As you can see in the image, the top-right word is spaced to loosely for such a big size; but its reduction (bottom-right) keeps a better quality of letter-recognition.

As for tight tracking in big sizes (you were wondering about it, weren’t you?), it’s sort of a different case. Is not as damaging, of course, since there’s more room for outlining the letter with the eyes, but it’s not actually an improvement; just more tolerable.

Still, since big type takes more room, it’s tempting to reduce the tracking: it’s OK, but don’t go wild with it; you’ll know some more tricks to go around this as you read along. And cabbages.

4. x-height And Vertical Proportions

It’s a widespread idea that a big x-height improves legibility/readability, but I have to say that this idea is an over-simplification. Not wrong, but a distortion by simplification, nonetheless.

Imagine that you’re designing a newspaper. Or a typeface family for a newspaper, same story. While it’s desirable to have a large x-height in the text typeface, it’s kind of irrelevant to do the same for the headline cut, right?

Now imagine that a newspaper contacts you to tweak their typeface. They want to keep the same char count, the same number of lines, but they feel that their text typeface is too small. Increasing the x-height seems logical.

But here’s the drill: the ascenders and the descenders, in proportion, as well as the caps, will shorten, considering that you want to keep your line-gap free from clutter. And you should be careful with this because…

4.1 Ascender And Descender Retraction Takes A Toll

… on cabbages. Er… I mean, on legibility and readability.

Consider the following animation:

As the x-height increases, the Futura-like d slowly starts to resemble a single-story lowercase a, increasing the probability of mixing those two.

And be aware that, since we scan words from their top, we leave the bottom of the words to a more peripheral part of our focus; this means that the descenders should be slightly longer than the ascenders.

Or, as Kevin Larson, via e-mail, has told me:

“We found in our studies of Sitka that a large x-height came with a trade-off; While the large size helped the neutral height letters, it hurt the ascending and descending letters.”

Note: let me remind you that this is not an absolute truth – in §6 we’ll cover another aspect that can compensate this retraction: it’s always a compromise of multiple factors. 

5. Counters

Open those counters!

This is actually one of the beefs I have with Helvetica, so you can imagine my surprise when Apple chose it as it’s UI font. But my jaw dropped when Apple stated the following:

In OS X Yosemite, fonts have been refined systemwide to be more legible and consistent across the Mac experience.

More legible? Seems like I missed a breakthrough research paper that contradicts centuries of type production. *long live sarcasm!*

But lets give the benefit of the doubt and round our quick Gaussian Blur + Threshold test, and pair Helvetica with another UI font: Microsoft’s Segoe UI (because it’s Apple’s main competitor and has a bigger counter aperture).

Here’s Helvetica:

And here’s Segoe UI:

If you’re still not convinced, step away from you computer and squint your eyes, shake your head, look away and back for a glimpse, decrease your monitor’s brightness, print it in a bad inkjet printer at a very small size and see which one performs better.

So, for low road mortality and low carbon-emission sake, keep Helvetica out of roadsigns. And cellphones – because no matter how stupid it is to text and drive, people will keep on doing it. Or get hit by a car while crossing a street without looking away from their cellphone, who knows.

Cabbages don’t cross the road staring at their cellphone.

6. Character Variation

This is one of the most important aspects of type design, regarding legibility.

While this is somewhat self-explanatory, here’s the rule of thumb:

The more distinct the glyphs are, the better.

It’s harder to tell twins apart, even though they have differences. So, as you can see in the images in §5, it’s easy to mistaken characters if they’re formally too similar.

Edit: Although obvious, this has an effect on the word level: glyph variation also increases variation in the word form, reducing ambiguity. *edit end*

But try not to build a Frankenfont: changing letterforms too radically, style-wise, creates confusion, slowing fast-recognition big time. And in the same idea, be sensitive about the amount of elements added to letterforms, since it might produce cluttering.

6.1 Serif versus Sans-serif

Remember, in the introduction, where I mentioned the discussions about serif’s functions on Typophile and Reddit that ended up in a derby between serif and sans-serif type? Well, now we have enough information to discuss this properly.

So, the answer to the question Which one is more readable, serif of sans-serif type?, the answer is No.

Following the motto there are no bad answers, only bad questions, this question is one of the bad ones. Serifs don’t automatically make type more legible (although they can help with character variation) and sans-serif simplicity is not always a plus.

It’s always a contextual matter and we have no empirical evidence that suggest the superiority of one of the styles.

So, why are sans-serifs almost universally used in signage and serifs in books? The answer is: available space and clichés.

Don’t get me wrong: clichés are a good thing, in this subject. If we’re aiming for legibility/readability, not clashing with people’s expectations is a good thing: we don’t want people crashing in the highway because a sign is set in Sabon, neither we want to read a romantic novel set in Comic Sans (although better than in Helvetica). *now I’m imagining the interwebs going rage on me!*

As for available space, serifs take more space than sans-serifs. Simple. And we want street signs to have big type on it, so we can read them from afar; in the same logic, in small type and longer lines of text, sans-serif create a kind of moiré effect in the texture, which is undesirable, since it requires effort.

Edit: And type size and word amount! I’m sorry for leaving this one out (props to Hrant Papazian, again)!

While we’re driving, it’s logical that a special focus on letter-by-letter recognition is paramount. Type is huge, and only one or two words are set per line, so it’s fast enough to decipher form and meaning.

But while reading a book, where there are a lot of words in a texture and type is set in a much shorter viewing arc, the bouma model fits best.

So serifs, in large chunks of text, have several advantages over sans: letters are “fused” together, the word shape has variety, white-space vs. rythym has diversity, and so on.

But I might be wrong.

*edit end* 

7. Width

This is another size-specific subject, under the condition of legibility improvement; I mean, if we set aside aesthetic considerations, some width adjustments can help with legibility.

Lets say that every time that you need to move your head (while looking at large type) or move it forward (in the case of tiny type), glyph width can help. With this said, we can conclude that small type is more welcoming of wide glyphs, while big type is more welcoming to condensed ones; although the case where the latter most benefits is when really, really large type is used and at a very short viewing arc.

And this leads us to…

8. Weight & Contrast

As you might have guessed by now, finer details don’t survive deterioration.

And if you think that this is a technological problem, such as pixel density or printer resolution, think again.

Imagine the following scenario: you have three different size circles and you want them to have the same stroke width, like this:

If I asked you to scale the circles to the same size, would they have the same stroke width? Of course not.

With a font, the exact opposite happens: if you have three circles with the same stroke width and scale them to different sizes, what happens?

If you think that I’m stating the obvious, man, I’m with you. But as simple as this might seem, it’s a good reminder of the kind of compensation necessary for different type sizes and a good starting point for size-specific designs.

In fact, I usually start a typeface by printing a bunch of circles and squares with different stroke widths at different point sizes, just to see how thin can it bear. And I do it again once I start adapting it to smaller and bigger sizes.

So, as a rule of thumb:

The smaller you get, the lesser should the contrast be.

But this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay attention to the thicker parts of your strokes; in fact, you should thicken them even a bit further.

It’s like having a stroke around your design: comparing the thicks and thins, the thinner parts will thicken more in proportion than the thicks.

To illustrate this idea, remember the image that opened this section? Here’s how it looks if we scale the type to the same size:

9. Conclusion

I hope that you’ve enjoyed the article and the cabbages!

I’d like to thank Michał Jarociński, for the suggestion, Kevin Larson and Hrant Papazian for the helping hand and you, for your attention!

So, if you found this helpful, please be so kind share the article with your friends or go shopping for some fonts, so I can keep writing these!

And don’t forget to check the Further Reading and References section, below: there’s more awesome stuff there!

Cheers to you!

Further Reading and References

• The Aesthetics of Reading – Larson, Kevin & Picard, Rosalin (PDF)
• Size-specific Adjustments to Type Designs – Ahrens, Tim & Mugikura, Shoko
• The Science of Word Recognition – Larson, Kevin
• The Development of the Signage Typeface Wayfinding Sans Pro – Herrmann, Ralph

The Art Of Eyeballing – Part IV: The Stroke (Optics)

Index

Introduction | Learning To See | Overshooting | The Stroke: Optics

This is the first article of three, in our series, to talk about the stroke.

We briefly introduced the idea (in the previous article) that the stroke width has an effect on perception and, for this reason, should be adjusted. So, this article is just about that: optical adjustments to stroke.

May I state it right now: this is not rocket science and the more elaborated considerations about stroke (such as modulation, for example) will be covered in the next articles. For now, we want to approach a very simple case – a monoline construction – and try to achieve balance.

And without further ado (and because I’m starting to feel way to serious while writing this), let’s skip to the good part.

1. Horizontal vs. Vertical

Let’s get right to it: in the image above, which are the thickest strokes? Vertical or horizontal? Take your time. Horizontal, right?

If you thought “they’re equal”, you’re right. But do they seem equal? To me, they don’t. And to most people, they also don’t.

But for many years, I simply trusted the computer. And, as always, the computer was right, so who was I to judge mathematical perfection? Well, this is about perceptual balance, not the first. Again, trust your eyes.

And here’s a correction (with horizontal strokes being about 1% thinner than the vertical ones):

But why does this happen? In honesty, I don’t really know, although I have some theories about it:

1. We have two eyes, distributed horizontally, making our area of eyesight wider than taller; and this might add relevance to vertically distributed elements;
2. In type, we have millennia of broadnib and flat brush writing, usually with 30 to 40º angle from an horizontal position, making horizontal strokes wider than vertical ones. But again, this could be due to a perception/optical/neurological phenomena.

If you’re wondering about how this works in typefaces, have a look here:

2. Orthogonal vs. Diagonal

Consider the following example:

Again, all the 3 lines have exactly the same stroke width. We already talked about how to compensate the horizontal line, so let’s just do that:

If it wasn’t obvious in the first image, now it is: the diagonal line also looks heavier than the orthogonal ones.

So, for comprehension’s sake, let’s give the diagonal line the same stroke width has the (already compensated) horizontal line:

… which makes the diagonal line too thin.

Before we get into the solution, I’d like you to consider a couple of things:

• This example is not random, i.e., I’ve picked a 45º angle to the diagonal line for a reason that you’re about to find out;
• We can only apply this to monoline fonts, although this is just a starting point (the next articles will cover more cases and correspondent corrections).

So, if neither of the horizontal nor the vertical strokes’ width is applicable to the 45º diagonal (which, again, is half-way rotated between the orthogonal axis), what happens if we pick the exact in-between stroke width? Here you go:

Does it look alright? *wink*

And now, you might be asking about other angles. If we apply the same width stroke to any diagonal, we get this:

If you compare the first two lines, the second looks too thin; and if you compare the last two, the former looks too thick.

So here we can start to acknowledge that the thickness of a diagonal line should vary according to it’s angle, and that it’s a progression between the horizontal and vertical widths.

Here’s a linear progression of angles and widths:

2.1 Tackling Slants and Widths

If you’re anything like me, by now you’re doing some stressful mental schemes on how to calculate the exact width of a diagonal, depending on the horizontal and vertical strokes’ widths.

So, in order to save you some stressful times, here’s a quick and dirty way to do it:

1. Draw an ellipse that has the same width as the vertical stroke and the same height as the horizontal stroke;
2. Adjust the strokes to be tangents to this ellipse.

Two steps method. This is what I call workflow optimization! Here’s a visual representation of the method:

And, to implement a tradition, here are these principles applied to type:

3. Straight vs. Curve

And we’re coming closer to an end.

Let’s start with the following image, where all the strokes are exactly the same (and the O is already overshot):

And now, let’s make the corrections that we already know about (horizontal and vertical, in this case):

Same kind of question: do the straight and curved strokes feel equal? You might want to take a step back it see the images from afar.

The H seems to pop out more that the O. And, as I mentioned, the O is already overshot, so it’s not a case of overshooting. Or is it?

Well, curves seem thinner that straight lines for the same reason we have to overshoot them: a lot of white space is created and positive mass is decreased, so we have to compensate for that.

But the thing to retain here is that curves seem thinner than straight lines and the amount of compensation needed isn’t as extreme as the one we do in the verticle / horizontal cases, so it’s closer to an overshooting compensation.

Let’s correct our example:

4. How Much?

If you’ve noticed, I wasn’t blunt about how much to compensate; in fact, I only gave one example in §1.

I could provide rules-of-thumb that would be percentage ranges of compensation, but I feel that this is a trap.

First (and again), I advise you not to make calculations; providing you such rules (on how much to compensate) would oblige you to make these calculations and I want you to design as freely as you can.

So take what you’ve learned today and trust you’re eye. If it looks awkward, well, it’s awkward. Teach yourself to pay attention to the forms, counterforms and whitespace. Inspect the curve/line segments on by one and compare them to the whole form. And to the whole group of forms.

Even if we dabble in maths and geometry, here, keep in mind that these are means to an end, not the end itself.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article, see you in the next one! Cheers!

References:

• The Stroke – Noordzij, Gerrit (Hyphen Press, 2005);
• Size-specific adjustments to type designs – Ahrens, Tim / Mugikura, Shoko (Just Another Foundry);
• Make Your Fonts Suck Less – Phinney, Thomas (video)

Calibrating Lucky Stripes

Some years ago (maybe a couple, maybe more: I excel at losing track of time), Ricardo Gomes, from Lucky Stripes Cigar Box Guitars, needed a script lettering for his guitars.

For me, this was a really cool project: making scripts is always fun and challenging, I could do a fast project (since it’s lettering), lots of freedom and, man, guitars. Guitars are super-cool. Specially Ricardo’s.

But the most important thing that happened was that some time passed and we could see how the lettering behaved in many different settings and applications, thus showing us what worked well and what wasn’t working.

This article is about this: what was wrong and how we fixed it.

1. Lucky Stripes?

Before we go and talk about lettering, you should check Ricardo’s guitars. He a luthier that makes custom cigar box guitars (meaning: the resonance box of the guitar is actually a cigar box), where he recycles materials to actually build them.

Check this beauty out, for example:

He even made one for Seasick Steve! Here’s a video of Seasick Steve playing a Lucky Stripes guitar:

So, if you want to contact him, do it: he’s super nice!

2. The Past

So, as we were talking, I doodled something, just to retain some ideas of what we were talking about.

Here’s the sketch:

Although most would feel ashamed of posting this in the interwebs (let alone showing this as a sketch to a client), I’m doing it anyways, for the following reasons:

1. This is a visual synthesis of the chat we had that in no way tries to be an usable solution;
2. From this I went directly to the computer, since I’m not a big fan of solving stuff on paper;
3. There’s nothing wrong with ugly sketches, simply because they’re sketches;
4. I don’t want to feel constrained to a very precise sketch while I’m working in vector, since it blocks my mind from trying something new;
5. And I don’t want to give the impression that a sketch is super-polished artwork. The amount of time that takes to produce an impeccable hand-made drawing is the same (or more) than a digital one, so it’s unrealistic to show something very close to final.

After I took a picture of the sketch with my cellphone, I did a quick center-line vector digitization of the sketch in Illustrator, sent the bitmap to oblivion and started tweaking it, until I got something like this:

Next step? Width Tool!

Although incredibly buggy (we’ll talk about that in a minute), the Width Tool is awesome to work with stroke modulation. Here, I maxed the stroke out, trying to find how thick the weight could go, and then started to add the thin strokes, in a pointed nib sort of logic: thicker down strokes, thinner upstrokes.

After getting close to what I wanted, I expanded the stroke, getting a Bézier hell like this:

And with modulation artifacts like this:

So, unless you want a destroy look in your piece, using the width tool as final art is a no-go, since it produces, as we just saw, an incredible amount of points (read here, here and here), not-so-smooth curves and a lot of strange artifacts.

So, as always, I redrew the whole thing on top of this, with proper Bézier point placement and with some minor tweaks. Here’s the result (with the previous drawing in red):

And BAM!, work done! Well, sort of.

3. The Problems

We were happy, for a while. I guess that, in my case, I overlooked some of the composition issues because I didn’t had some distance to see it more analytically, and, to be honest, since then I’ve learned some more things to look out for.

So, having the chance to tweak it again, after some time, I was thrilled! I had a long time to look at it and think “I’d change this” or “That doesn’t look right”, and now it was time to solve it!

Anyway, let’s talk about some of the problems.

3.1 White Space

The overall interplay of positive and negative space here is pretty much inconsistent and with two major mistakes:

1. The amount of white space between the L and the u is huge, sometimes appearing as part of two different words;
2. The r is a disaster: too blobby, too close to the t‘s bar (overcrowding that area) and the loop is not readable at all.

3.2 Flow

In general, the design had too many (apparent) corners, resulting in a somewhat breaky flow, with too many places for the eye to decelerate and make a sharp turn. Since we were looking for a smooth result, this wasn’t desired.

At the same time, although some irregularity in letter size and slope was intended, in some cases the letters were too small (like the u), too big (like the r) and too slanted (S and t).

3.3 Line Consistency

If you ever worked with a pointed nib or a pointed/conical brush, you’ve probably have guessed that the modulation is very weird.

Let’s think of the thin lines as the thinnest that the tool we’re trying to emulate is capable of doing. With this said, there’s some space for variation in the thickest parts of the strokes, but not so much for the thinnest (although possible).

I happened to do it the other way around: the thicker strokes are pretty consistent, while the thinner… well, they’re a mess.

 3.2 Size issues

The main reason for calibrating this logo was that it didn’t work properly at small sizes, for two reasons:

1. Due to poor design;
2. Due to bad printing conditions and ink spread.

The following image show us what happens with loss of resolution and with ink spread. If you want to test your stuff, this was done playing with incremental Gaussian Blur and then applying a Threshold filter.

So the most immediate things that happen and severely compromise legibility and form recognition are:

1. The counters and inner forms that are too small immediately disappear. In this case, the c and the e;
2. The overcrowded areas (like the t‘s bar and the r, or the upper and lower part of the y) become unreadable black blobs.

4. The Solutions

The goal was to correct the previous problems without changing the form too much, since Ricardo has developed a respectable fan base in the time period.

Here’s a list of some of the most important changes:

1. Opened the counters, to avoid the ink spread so that they wouldn’t disappear;
2. Corrected the line inconsistencies;
3. Corrected the sharp turns, in order to become smoother;
4. Corrected the i‘s dot to balance it’s weight and the white space around it;
5. Corrected the r, paying attention to the loop and the horizontal stroke;
6. Harmonized the u and the space between it and the L;
7. Added some ink-traps in problematic areas;
8. Simplified the p‘s and k‘s vertical stem (there was no need to retain the calligraphic quality of it, since it made the bottom blobby);
9. Altered the swash in order to become more organic and smoother.

And here’s a side-by-side comparison of the old lettering with the new:

And here’s the blur + threshold result:

 5. Wrapping Up

I hope you enjoyed this article! If you did, don’t forget to share it with your friends (you can use the buttons below)!

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Bézier OCD Or Why You Should Know About Point Placement

0. Introduction

If you’ve been visiting this blog, you might be wondering why I’m writing another article about this subject.

You’ve probably read Bézier Curves And Type Design: A Tutorial and Bézier Curve Quick Tips: Two Methods For Smooth Curves, along with AGSC’s article So What’s the Big Deal with Horizontal & Vertical Bezier Handles Anyway?, and you might think that, for graphic designers and related métiers, things are pretty much covered.

Well, they’re not. The suggestions to keep nodes at extrema, handles vertical or horizontal, use explicit inflection points, balance the handles and so on aren’t just workflow optimizations: they’re methods to overcome technical problems.

So, today, I want to give you the reasons why these point-placement methods should be used extensively, in a more in-depth way than in the previous two articles (and again, here and here, because I strongly suggest you to read them before reading this one).

Ready? Go!

1. It Reduces Point Placement

This one is a no-brainer. As discussed before, in cubic Bézier curves, the most simple way to describe a curve is with two nodes and two handles, and if we keep angles smaller than 90º, we can easily draw any curve. So, working with extra points doesn’t seem much of an advantage, since it ends up with you having more stuff to deal with.

1.1 And Thus, It Reduces File Size

Less points, less coordinates. Less coordinates, smaller file size. Done.

2. Rasterizers Are Dumb

This section and §3 are this article’s gem: the stuff that you don’t usually see being talked about.

In Bézier Curves And Type Design we barely scratched the surface on this. Remember how a cubic Bézier curve is constructed? The animations there show how a Bézier curve rasterizer builds a curve through a method called linear interpolation. Let’s start there.

2.1 Linear Interpolation

Linear interpolation is a method of curve fitting that uses linear polynomials (read line segments joined together to fit a curve), and this is how computers draw Bézier curves, because De Casteljau’s algorithm (the one used in Bézier curves) was made to do precisely this.

So, as we know the Bézier Curves And Type Design‘s animations, the curve is broke into several linear steps. Have a look:

Fibonacci FTW!

Be aware that the subdivisions are per segment: from anchor point to anchor point.

So, with this said, how would the previous animation look with odd point placement? Here you go:

As you might have guessed, the perceptual smoothing of each segment through the various iterations differ quite a bit:

• The shorter the segment, the quicker it appears to be smooth;
• Since the segments differ in size, the smoothing appears to be uneven.

Ever worked with splines in 3D software? If you have, you know the pain it is (or used to be, rasterizers did get better) to convert it to a mesh, with steps unequally distributed along the spline. Or Flash, that converts the curves to line segments for processing and file size’s sake. Now you know why.

How to solve this? Same recomendations:

• Keep smooth nodes at the extrema;
• Keep smooth nodes’ handles straight vertically or horizontally;
• Balance the handles;
• Use explicit inflection points.

2.2 And Rasterizers Should Be Dumb; You’re The One Who Should Be Smart

Why? Because linear interpolation isn’t the only thing to worry about, when it comes to rasterizers.

We want our vector drawings to be cross-compatible between formats, rasterizers, hinters, printers, parsers, and the list goes on. So it’s our job to know a little bit more and try to minize conversion errors. Just because something looks good in Illustrator, it doesn’t mean that it will look good in an old printer.

And if you convert your drawing from cubic to quadratic and back to cubic and then interpolate it, welcome to hell.

3. Hinting

Though this part is somewhat related to §2, it deserves a different section.

Let’s get this straight: hinting is not exclusive to type design; in truth, every printer, for example, only prints bitmaps, i.e., it hints the vector artwork first. And printers may have their own rasterizers and hinters, and the way you draw can make a difference.

The reason why it’s an obvious type concern is that we (type designers) deal with a finer degree of detail in way smaller sizes.

But, in spite of rasterizers becoming better and better, it doesn’t mean that graphic designers shouldn’t be concerned about it too.

And with this I don’t mean that we should rasterize vector work and start editing pixels: you should, however, try to draw vector art as fool-proof as you can.

Can the way you draw influence hinting? Yes, very slightly, but yes. And the smaller you get, the more crucial it becomes.

4. Conclusion

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this! Happy drawing!

Cheers!

Bézier Curve Quick Tips: Two Methods For Smooth Curves

Fixing curves, for me, is an every day activity. Sometimes they look oddly pointy, too steep or too wide, guiding my eyes to awkwardness.

And since I’m an optimization freak (as you could tell on my previous article on Bézier curves), I end up using some procedures to tackle problems.

So, today I want to share with you a couple of techniques I use a lot. Here we go!

1. Method 1

If you’ve read my article on Bézier curves (and you should for the sake of understanding this article), you’ve noticed that I stressed on how important point placement is. Here’s a summary of what I recommended:

1. Keep nodes at the extrema;
2. Keep handles vertical or horizontal (with the obvious exception of corners);
3. Use explicit inflection points.

But this doesn’t mean that you should immediately start drawing this way; these are only requirements for you final work.

With this said, consider the following lowercase n:

As you can see, those curves are in terrible shape, due to unfortunate point placement, resulting in pointy areas. So, how do we solve this?

Let’s start by fixing the top curve:

Here’s what happened:

• Figure 1: The first step is to bring a guideline to mark where our extreme-top point is, for overshooting purposes;
• Figure 2: Then we remove the extreme point and adjust the curve to out liking, while using the guideline as a reference for how much up the curve can go. The gray dotted line is just the previous curve;
• Figure 3: And finally, we add the extreme point. You can eyeball this, it’s nothing fancy. The extreme point should just be where the curve touches the guideline.

And here’s the same process for the inside curve:

And a comparison between our original n and our corrected one:

So, what happened here? Here’s some observations:

1. Manipulating two handles is way easier than four handles and an anchor;
2. This method provides us a way to find the optimum position for where the extreme anchor should go;
3. We let the point addition algorithm find out the best handle position for us;
4. Even if we need to do some minor adjustments, it’s easier and safer to adjust a respectable curve than a clumsy one (I know I’m personalizing the curves, I know).

1.1 Problems With This Method

This has some limitations, of course:

1. It’s not adjustment proof: You might still need to do adjustments to the curve. But hey, you’re closer than you were! And prepare yourself for §2, it might come in handy;
2. It doesn’t work very well with angles above 180º: For the same reason that we can’t use this method with quadratic Bézier curves, we would need 4th or higher-order Bézier curves to use this method with a fair degree of control. And in plain English: this works with parallel handles or with a smaller angle, because otherwise, you’re no able to control the curve’s extension and steepness. And here’s an animated GIF, because you guys love these things:

2. Method 2

And here we are. *awkard stare*

So, back to business: how do the point-addition algorithms distribute the handle length? Well, they keep the handle length proportionally equal, to keep the curve as smooth as possible.

With this in mind, when we have our handles in a 90º angle, we can fit our 4 points in a square. And with less than 90º, a trapezoid:

Let’s stick with the rectangle, for simplicity’s sake.

By now, your inquisitive mind might be asking:

What happens to the curve if one handle grows from the minimum to the maximum length, inscribed in the rectangle, while the other does the opposite?

And now you must be thinking how did I read your thoughts, right? Right.

But let’s not deviated from the subject; here’s what happens:

As you can see, the curve bulges slightly in the extended handle’s side and gets steeper in the retracted one.

Now, what happens if both handles go from minimum to maximum length?

You probably saw this coming.

Well, first of all, I apologize for the slow build up, but I wanted you to be aware of the two factors, because you’ll be dealing with them with this method.

By the way, I don’t know if you keep the habit of click-and-dragging curves, but if you don’t, start doing it. And in most drawing applications, holding the Shift key down keeps the handles in the same vector.

If we want to keep the handles’ lengths proportionally equal, the rectangle from their maximum length point to their actual position has to be proportional to the anchor’s rectangle. Here’s an image to clear this out:

The effect that this has on this curve is minimum, but it distributes the curvature evenly.

So, here are the steps to do this:

1. Get an unevenly distributed curve;
2. Extend the handles to their intersection point;
3. Press the Shift key (to keep handles straight), click on top of the curve and drag it back. Gently tilt to the sides, trying to get both handles proportionally equal until you get the curvature you desire.

With practice, you’ll be able to eyeball the entire process and still get some sweet and smooth curves.

3. Final Thoughts

I hope you’ve found this article helpful, since I find these make me work faster (I struggle less to achieve satisfactory results), while it keeps the overall look of my work consistent.

Thanks for reading this and if you like it, share the knowledge! Cheers!