Shaping Light — 01: Introduction

Shaping Light series -- Index
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01: Introduction | 02: Building Waves

There are some things about The Art of Eyeballing series that really never satisfied me.

First, it is too unfocused: it lives under a general practice of type design, sure — but theory of perception, of the stroke, optical adjustments, form analysis; all these can have their own dedicated series. They’re fields of inquiry in their own right. Cramming them together does serve some functions, mostly to say that these things exist, but it throws them to the realm of curiosity rather than actionable comprehension. So, being prescriptive in such a setting is either uncommitted or ignorant¹.

Second, exploring and simulating the optical/physical reasons for optical adjustments was the subject of my PhD research. I didn’t manage to finish it — I had a burnout midway through² –, but I never stopped the research (even if outside academia). Shortcomings and perks of a neurodivergent brain.

Anyway, I have a lot more to share. And I really want to: I stumbled into a lot of fascinating stuff along the way, and it feels selfish to hold years of research close to my chest. I could write it all down and publish it, sure, but I could also, instead, write it in public — and I like this idea. It is still on my own terms, my own pace, with the pause I need and that the subject deserves.

1. So, what is this series about?

Well, it’s about the physical phenomena of seeing and how it applies to type designs. How diffraction and refraction affect the forms we see, how we measure them, how we adjust our designs optically.

So, as a summary, this series is about optical adjustments to type designs.

The goal here is to teach light physics to designers — in this very particular case — and in their own language. So I’ll try my best to keep equations far away (maybe some pseudocode if we need it, but sparsely), illustrate it as much as possible, add interaction and animations to clarify³. Also, if you’re feeling brave enough to dive deeper in any given subject, I’ll try to reference it as thoroughly as I can.

If this scares you at all, a lot of my master’s students went through a very speedy version of this. They’re fine. And this isn’t rocket science, just light physics⁴.

So I hope you have fun going through this.

Further Reading, References

• Ahrens, T., & Mugikura, S. (2014). Size-specific adjustments to type designs. Just Another Foundry.
• Fowles, G. R. (1990). Introduction to Modern Optics. Dover Publications Inc.

1. And whoever goes through the time of reading it, deserves better. ↩︎
2. I’m doing good now, don’t worry! ↩︎
3. We’ll still have to go through these, because we’re interested in the mechanics of it: later on, it is important to have a decent mental image of what is going on. ↩︎
4. wink ↩︎