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:

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!

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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Cheers!