Lettering – Scannerlicker

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:

Your logo is done, but could be better and you don’t know how nor why;
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:

Fig. 1: Left — the logo Identity Works! sent me; Right — the corrected version.

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:

Fig. 2: Left — Original S; Right — Corrected S.

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:

Fig. 3: Left — Original X intersection (close-up); Right — Corrected X intersection (close-up).

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!

You can also subscribe to the newsletter below, if you want to keep track with what is going on.

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

Until next time!

The Art Of Eyeballing – Part V: Stroke (Modulation: Introduction)

Part I: Introduction | Part II: Learning To See | Part III: Overshooting | Part IV: The Stroke (Optics)

0. Introduction

Welcome back!

I’ve been rewriting this article for ages now, so I’m glad to finally share this with you!

Today we’re going through a subject that it’s apparently simple, but the degree of complexity and abstraction can escalate pretty quickly, so I’ll be dividing this article in four sections: Introduction, Translation, Expansion and Scatter.

So this first part deals with the basic concepts that we need to understand this matter thoroughly; some structural, some a bit more abstract.

Scared? Great: it means that this will be easier than what you’re thinking. Let’s get this started!

1. Modulation

So, what the heck is modulation? Let me try to give one of my famously cryptic definitions:

In type, modulation is the register of a given tool on a given surface, through a given gesture, or the emulation of this.

Dude, you should write poetry. Yeah, I know.

In the human-friendly version, when you draw a letter with – let’s say – a ball-point pen, you make a certain gesture with your hand that, on a piece of paper, makes the pen release ink and produce a certain shape. Obvious stuff.

Now, let’s say you use a pointed brush instead of a pen. Depending on the pressure, angle and surface (imagine doing this on wood, for example), even if you make the exact same gesture, the shape produced will be different: there will be thicks and thins, rough edges and so on.

Or, if you’re drawing in a digital environment, you’ll be emulating this result.

So, modulation is the way a tool creates variation in a stroke, whether analogue (via calligraphy) or emulated (via lettering or type design). Or the variation of the stroke itself.

2. Gesture and Ductus

I guess I don’t have to explain what gesture is, since it’s not a matter of type-specific jargon. But when you do a gesture, it follows a path. To this path, we call it ductus.

The ductus is the skeleton of a letter. Although an abstraction, think of it as the path from where the stroke expands, or as the path of a writing tool.

Some definitions will tell you that you can get to the ductus by a reduction of the stroke towards the middle of the letter, but this is an imprecision: this might work in the case of translation (as you’ll see later on), but in most situations, especially when it comes to drawing glyphs by outlining them, the modulation around the ductus is assymetric.

3. Velocity, Pressure, Angle and Rotation

Especially in the translation model, angle is commonly treated as being fixed. This means that the writing tool (i.e. broad-nib pen) will be held at a certain angle and this won’t change while it propagates through the ductus. Still, every calligrapher knows that “rule” is just for comprehension sake; in fact, the angle can change a lot, even with a broad-nib pen.

How the angle of the tool changes in the gesture is vital to understand velocity and rotation: rotation is the variation of the tool’s angle, while velocity is the speed of which this rotation happens.

As you can see above, these factors have a huge impact on the shape of the stroke.

Finally, let’s consider pressure. Though we can almost ignore pressure in the case of translation and/or pushy people, it plays a big deal in the expansion and scatter models.

This item on our list will be explored further in the series (pretty much as any of the others), but here’s a simple explanation: the force exerted by the writing tool against the surface may influence the stroke. Take a pointed brush or nib, for example: as further pressure is applied, the stroke expands accordingly.

4. Some considerations

Before we move on, there’s a couple of things that I’d like you to keep in mind.

First of all, if you’re still a bit confused, things will become more obvious in the next articles, where you’ll see these concepts in action. So pat yourself on the back and plow through.

Second, you don’t have to become and expert calligrapher in order to produce good lettering or type designs. In fact, you don’t have to do calligraphy at all, although it wouldn’t hurt. The goal here is to understand where letterforms come from and to know how writing tools work, so you can analyse form in a more knowledgeable way, developing your sensibility.

Third, purely emulating these concepts and processes won’t produce satisfactory end results. There’s a lot more to do on top of this, such as optical corrections, curve quality, formal consistency and such. Still, knowing this will, for sure, aid you in achieving better end results.

Fourth, read Gerrit Noordzij‘s The Stroke. Really, get it and read it: it’s a fascinating read.

5. Wrapping up

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article, since you’re at the doorstep of some very interesting stuff: we’re going to put these concepts to work in the next few articles, so subscribe below to get notified and see you in the next chapters!

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:

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.
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!

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:

This is a visual synthesis of the chat we had that in no way tries to be an usable solution;
From this I went directly to the computer, since I’m not a big fan of solving stuff on paper;
There’s nothing wrong with ugly sketches, simply because they’re sketches;
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;
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:

The amount of white space between the L and the u is huge, sometimes appearing as part of two different words;
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:

Due to poor design;
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:

The counters and inner forms that are too small immediately disappear. In this case, the c and the e;
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:

Opened the counters, to avoid the ink spread so that they wouldn’t disappear;
Corrected the line inconsistencies;
Corrected the sharp turns, in order to become smoother;
Corrected the i‘s dot to balance it’s weight and the white space around it;
Corrected the r, paying attention to the loop and the horizontal stroke;
Harmonized the u and the space between it and the L;
Added some ink-traps in problematic areas;
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);
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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Cheers!