Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Old Type Forged Anew

20110322 fauxcast
(typos left in for true fake-typecast authenticity)
Eagle-eyed viewers of the Typosphere page may note that the header is now done with one of Richard's fonts (Byron Mark II)

I'd be thrilled to contribute what few typefaces I have to a project like this: I don't know how much trouble it is to convert a scan into a face, but I have some faces -- even mundane ones -- that I'm fond of, like the rounded Roman letters of my SM-9, and the face on my Smith-Corona Sterling that has little half-serifs on its lowercase "n" And of course, I think the letters of the script Lettera are worth preserving... and aligning, which is easy on the digital side.

Richard... Georg... are you up for some scanning?

7 comments:

Richard P said...

Georg Sommeregger did a wonderful thing by digitizing that obscure typeface.

Turning typing into a font is not that hard to do; it takes a scanner, an image manipulation program, a steady mouse hand, an hour or two, and a few dollars. I give basic instructions on my fonts page, but will be happy to help people out further if they want more tips (polt@xavier.edu).

ToriForte said...

Awesome! Now I can *almost* fulfill my lust for a script machine, until I get one of my own...

Adwoa said...

This is so very lovely! I think it might supplant Olympia type style 69 as my favorite script type.

Thanks for the tip on how to use it for a typecast - here I was thinking one had to literally print out the document and scan it back in. Sigh. This way is so much easier and environmentally-friendly!

shordzi said...

Thank you all so much! I feel honoured, and humbly vow to produce some more in my idle hours. Technically, as Richard points out, the procedure via yourfonts.com is clearcut. All you need to invest is some time (this again depends on how perfect you want the font to look), and 14 dollars or so, which is what yourfonts.com charges. And the possibilities are boundless, e.g. print with regular ribbon, carbon ribbon, or inkpad, depending on how crisp or used you want the font to appear. As Captain Kirk, who celebrated his 80th birthday yesterday said: unchartered territories! ready for us typewriter aficionados to plough!

MTCoalhopper said...

So... those are real, typewritten characters, scanned into digital, and then used to simulate a typewritten font... which you are posting as a typecast? I am not sure if that is not the most convoluted way I have heard of to play in our little sandbox.

For those of us who would LOVE to have a script machine, that is a viable work-around... for a while.

Duffy Moon said...

Hmmm.
(looking at Clemens in a suspicious, sidelong, squinty kind of way.)
I'm not sure how I feel about this.
I think the best thing for us to do is to have huge, typospherical cage-match to establish the guidelines for typographical purity. That'll make us all feel better.
(j/k. awesome. well done. love it. keep up the good work. I'd like to buy you all a Coke.)

mpclemens said...

The font is outstanding, and although I don't find myself reaching for my lone script machine that often, I can admit to having a lot of fun (virtually) typing this up.

Duffy, don't be hatin', you of the artistic-lamp-posts. (Not lampposts, which are something different entirely.)