C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2006 09:38:41 -0400 (CLT)

Last night I designed a minimal typeface after thinking about an exercise
in Ellen Lupton's "Thinking with Type" (you can see the exercise at
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1568984480.01.IN01._SS400_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)

It's based on 2x4 pixel grid (ie very small), but it works (imho).  The
only ambiguity is between numbers and letters (and if you use the an
alternate design, that reduces to the ambiguity between the letter "l" and
the digit "1").  It contains punctuation, but no accents and no capitals;
there's also a small compromise in the handling of "m" and "w" (although
again, an alternative avoids that compromise).

It was a good exercise - as you might expect, if you've thought about
Hofstadter's letterfont project, there's a surprising amount of
flexibility available, even within the tight constraints I chose. 
Surprisingly, the critical letters were "c" and "z", in that finding good
representations for those catalysed the final approach.

I'm going to write a couple of web pages to present it, including a
JavaScript typesetter.  When I'm done, I'll post here.

Andrew