YouTypeThe strange allure of making your own fonts.
Posted Friday, June 6, 2008, at 1:30 PM ET
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponI was a minuscule part of the great grunge-font craze of the late '90s, ignited by the bad boy of graphic design, David Carson—an ex-surfer who took over RayGun magazine and turned it into a punk-rock version of Rolling Stone, a bible of the ugly/pretty/ugly aesthetic. Carson's movement was fueled by hundreds of young dabblers like me. In our dorm rooms, we churned out distressed versions of workaday fonts: smeary Helveticas, grimy Garamonds. The self-seriousness behind it all seems strange when I look back, but it was actually in keeping with the manifesto-laden history of graphic design. One of the most famous designers of all time, Jan Tschichold, famously issued a diktat against the use of serif faces, decreeing that the only honest letterforms were sans-serifs. The Nazis, who preferred "blackletter" fonts with heavy, ominous down strokes—what came to be known as "jackboot grotesques," according to art historian Stephen Eskilson—put him in prison.
The FontStruct community represents the opposite of all of that. FontStruct is about fun and lighthearted experimentation, the pure joy of making letterforms. If the fonts on the site embrace any aesthetic, it's the freewheeling kitsch of the early days of desktop publishing, when programs like Adobe PageMaker brought the tools of graphic design to the masses well before the masses knew what to do with them. This led to some heinous crimes against the craft, like annual reports plastered with novelty fonts. You'll find some of that 1980s exuberance in FontStruct's offerings, like a font that has hairdos, and a font that looks like a city skyline, and a font that's a bunch of adorable monkeys. But the program also inspires subtler fits of out-of-the-box image-making. Check out the very sexy Structurosa Script, a font that is "cute but also menacing," as one commenter accurately observes, and WPA Gothic, modeled on New Deal-era posters and dripping with gravitas and retro cool. My favorite FontStruction is probably SlabStruct Too, a font that's simultaneously meaty and understated, elegant and crisp. (The best part is that I didn't have to dig through pages and pages of lesser fonts to find these gems, because FontStruct has a star-based rating system similar to YouTube's.)
The FontStruct aesthetic is largely a function of the font-making application. Unlike the gold-standard program for making fonts, Fontographer, which can turn any shape into a letter, FontStruct imposes constraints. It doesn't let you make just any shape; you're limited to the "bricks" FontStruct provides. Also, your font has to be "modular," the letters conforming to a standard grid (which precludes overly fancy cursive strokes). FontStruct is the Casiotone keyboard of font-making. Maybe you can use it to bang out a credible pop song. Beethoven? No way.
And yet, as often happens in art, aesthetic limitations breed creativity. The most ambitious FontStruct users have created letterforms so ornate you'd never believe they're derived from a set of prefab shapes. One particularly heroic FontStruct auteur, Wolfgang Krimmel, who seems to be an actual graphic design pro—a ringer!—has constructed two fonts that resemble the text from illuminated manuscripts. Dabblers like me also benefit from the program's limitations. As soon as I registered and clicked "Create New FontStruction," I began to draw short, fat, blocky letters just a few pixels high. Then I realized I could make the letters as high as I wanted, so I used cut-and-paste tools to elongate my A and B and C until they were tall and thin and imposing, like the alien ships in War of the Worlds. Then—I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this—I used one of the program's many editing shortcuts to make it look as if my letters were composed of five-pointed stars. Just because I could. Serendipity is the whole point. FontStruct forces you to be open-minded, to be kind toward the unexpected forms you stumble into. And because FontStruct lets you preview your letters with one click, you can decide instantly whether to keep your changes or sprint off in a completely new direction.
This instant-gratification quality is the true appeal of FontStruct and of font-making in general. There's something about that moment when your own letters begin to flash across the screen. Partly, it's sheer childlike bliss—after all, how many hours do we spend as kids learning how to write in cursive, writing our name over and over, regarding our handwriting, hoping it's special, stylish, distinguishable from the next kid's? But it's also satisfying in a distinctly grown-up way. If you're reading this, you're probably like me, and you have a job in which you stare at a screen all day. And it's not even your screen. It's somebody else's pixels and windows and letters. Make a font and you start to screw with the scenery—the banal yet elemental DNA of your daily existence. It's as if you could design and build your own subway turnstile or change the color of a Starbucks cup from off-white to fuchsia. Here's a program that lets you commit a small, safe, infinitesimally subversive act and then share it with the world. FontStruct may make it worth aspiring to be a little Frutiger, after all.
What Obama Meant—and Didn't Mean—About "Beginning" To Withdraw in July 2011
49 Million Americans Are Hungry. What Can You Do To Help? 
Admit It, Dems: These Reform Bills Won't Control Health Care Costs
Parks and Recreation Is Now Better Than 30 Rock and The Office
Lithwick: The Supreme Court's Best Beach-House Case Ever
The Economic Reports About Christmas Shopping Are Confusing, Contradictory, and Useless
Remarks from the Fray:
I'm a bit surprised the author of "The strange allure of making your own fonts" didn't mention the classic work on computer typefonts by Donald Knuth. Knuth is almost certainly the greatest computer scientist of the twentieth century and has had a near obsession with developing computer software to typeset his books - which means full-blown mathematical text. His classic work on the subject, the software known as TeX, received a prize from the American Mathematical Society in the late 1970's. His prize lecture was published by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1979, with the title "TeX and Metafont: New Directions in Typesetting". While TeX itself is interesting software, the corresponding work on creating typefonts is also a very significant work.
The manual for Metafont, "The METAFONTbook", published by Addison Wesley (1986) is also an interesting piece of software. As the Preface to this work explains, "METAFONT is a system for the design of alphabets suited to raster-based devices that print or display text." It later continues "A METAFONT usseres writes a 'program' for each letter or symbol of a typeface."
Both TeX and METAFONT are available through the Web. For Windows, the usual package is MikTeX - a rather large and sophisticated installation. However, the software and the fonts are extremely stable. Readers interested in advanced versions of typefonts might well take a look at METAFONT.
--brb
(To reply, click here.)
(6/10)