On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Something of possible interest to fans of the following topics:

• Star Trek Design
• Conlangs
• Constructed scripts
• Fonts
• Fan art
• Typography
• Font design

https://vulcanquest.wordpress.com/2019/12/22/fonts/

Okay, Comicraft is holding a 30th Anniversary promotion right now. They're the first big comic book design-oriented font design house in the world that I know of, started by Richard Starkings and John Roshell. They decided to kick off with thirty days of releasing remasters of their offerings, starting with their first font family, Comicrazy.

They're already set up for most European languages using Latin script, and back in 2015 added Cyrillic support. This year, they've added support for Vietnamese adaptations of Latin, as well as Hebrew script, which marks a first for that font family.

If you already own a license for Comicrazy, you'll get the update as part of your long-term support arrangements. Just check your "My Account - Order History" files if you bought a license after 2010.

(I bought a license back around 2015, hence my downloading.)

If you haven't got Comicrazy yet, my advice would be to wait for Comicraft's annual New Year Font Sale. I expect every family in the catalogue to be on offer during that sale at US$20.22 per next New Year's. Unless you've suddenly hit it big in the local lottery, or are otherwise highly fortunate, in which case, I would recommend you splurge now.

Some of you might be interested in this:

https://www.typotheque.com/blog/north_american_syllabics_fonts

So I'm reading this one at the moment:

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/united-fonts-of-america

It's a commentary about a map detailing places across the USA that have had fonts - or knockoffs of better-known fonts, more likely - named after them. Said map being authored by one Andy Murdock, co-founder of the Statesider newsletter.

Getting to my point: I'm now wondering how many fonts are named for Canadian places. I know a guy who's had a habit of naming some of his fonts after places across Canada, Ray Larabie. You may remember my past recommendations of his Typodermic-brand fonts here in this blog.

Fonts named for places like Arnprior, for one example. Rimouski, for another. Athabasca for a third. And so on...

So, where's our font-name map of Canada?

Wow.

Speaking of progress in creating technological infrastructure for language preservation and revival...I'm not sure I understand even a tenth of what I'm reading here. But seeing this work laid out at all?

Incredible.

https://twitter.com/calligraphio/status/1385241930905399298

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21088-ucas-revisions.pdf

Following up on a discussion begun in September 2020. This time around, the focus is Helvetica Ultra-Compressed and its knockoff, Swiss 911 Ultra Compressed.

Also, the commentary is going to wander a bit, because like the previous installment, TV space-adventure shows past and present are involved.

If you were a Star Trek fan back during the late 1980's and most of the 1990's, you knew this typeface almost on sight, because about halfway through The Next Generation's run, Starfleet had switched over from Compacta Bold + Compressed and at least one lesser-known font to this one for their LCARS user interface screens. Deep Space Nine and Voyager also made heavy use of it for the same reasons. Swiss 911 UC was probably easier to afford at the time. I haven't asked the question of graphic designer/tech advisor Mike Okuda, to be honest, of how the switch happened and why.

Both Compacta and Helvetica/Swiss are - to my eyes - legible, which is what you want in a font that Starfleet's decided to make part of its operational standards kit.

Other knockoffs have been made that were easier still to buy, or just download as freebies in some cases. I'd argue that the ease of that made entry for thousands of would-be graphic designers a trivial matter.

But it started with that particular weight and style of Helvetica.

This past year or so, the TNG/DS9/VOY timeframe has been revisited by way of Picard and more recently, Lower Decks. The latter enthusiastically dives back into that style choice. Whether the fact that Lower Decks was created as an animated series plays into the decision and to what degree, I don't know and don't care.

Picard, being set about twenty years after the start of Lower Decks, went a different way. I found out what the choice was via Twitter: Tungsten from Hoefler and Co.. This was a surprise. More recently, I got to see a video explaining the choice of Tungsten over returning to the classic font, which comes towards the end of this Trekzone interview:



Excerpting from this history of the Net's three most popular fonts' journey to that popularity...

Arial grew in popularity both because of its selection as a Microsoft core font and its design as a sans serif. It was, quite simply, the most accessible sans serif font available to most people with computers, and sans serif fonts were growing in popularity with the increase in computer usage. Although Helvetica is the superior sans serif font to many, Microsoft chose Arial in part because the licensing fee for Helvetica was too expensive.

I understand the need for the additional weights that Tungsten affords...and the price asked by Hoefler is...likely problematic - at the moment - for a lot of graphics-focused fans. Including myself right now. My complaint - is that the right word here? - is with Hoefler as a business concern, not with anyone else for any other reason. Not with Andrew Jarvis. He made the best choice possible for the job he had in front of him (and one I hope he keeps, especially since that will allow him to work with Geoffrey "Star Charts" Mandel himself next season).

It's not that I don't want designers to get paid for their work. I do. I'm just on a tighter budget at this point. If I were to win the LottoMax jackpot on, say, next Tuesday night, I'll likely pay the full US$199.00 for the basic eight-weights Tungsten kit and stop commenting on the subject altogether.

Also, I wonder if the foundry's management understands how large a potential customer base they can now reach out to. Trek fans are a big crowd. Multinational, also multilingual...

Oh.

Oh.

And now I'm starting to understand why they might want or need to keep the price tag as is for the time being. Because Starfleet also has to be multilingual. If you want to adapt a script to other orthographies...and Tungsten is still Latin-only for now, right?

Anyway, one further thought: Tungsten is now a cartography font, in part thanks to its usage in Picard. I am tempted to expect that the next revision of either Stellar Cartography or - my personal hope - Star Charts will include maps made with Tungsten. Hoefler will have to amend this promotional campaign accordingly.

A day and a half late with this entry. But it's here now. It doesn't feel all that different so far, of course.

Stuff I've been doing:

• Watching "Revolution of the Daleks" on Doctor Who.
• Reading The Art of Star Trek: Discovery.
• Buying fonts in Comicraft's annual New Year's Font Sale. This year: revised edition of Wiccan, along with Doohickey Lower and Ultimatum.
• Checking in with Canadian Conrunners Central on Discord.
• Grocery errands for the household.
• Sketchbook practice on actual paper.
• Assorted house chores.

More as it develops...

I've been watching their YouTube channel (among other chores), hence my lack of posting much of anything more than replies to some of your own postings yesterday. I'm sorry for that.

Last week, kestrell spoke about preferred fonts for accessibility re: websites. Also, she asked this question:

Do folks have favorite fonts?

She has her own goals in mind for the answers to that question, regarding accessibility, and she's been getting useful answers from her friendlist. For myself, selfishly, I do have a list of favourites. Many - most? - of these favourites have very little to do with such concerns. There's a lot of aesthetic considerations and a lot of personal nostalgia in play with my list. There is a certain amount of privilege - the privilege of being sighted all my life thus far - in my thinking here. This is selfish. Absolutely so.

That said, I am going to go into some detail about my own list of favoured fonts. In this entry, and probably others down the line.

I start with Space: 1999. That TV series in the mid-1970's created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson was where I first started to care about typefaces, fonts, that sort of thing. Particularly the first season. Moonbase Alpha, the main backdrop of the series, doomed to wander the universe by an ill-placed nuclear waste dump turning a large chunk of our Moon into a giant fusion rocket...that place had a particular design aesthetic. Signage across the moonbase was in a font called "Countdown". Designed by Colin Brignall, I don't know how it reached the attention of Space: 1999's set designers and graphic designers.

He also designed Superstar, the font that Milton Glaser incorporated into the classic "Bullet" logo of DC Comics. So there's two.

Back to Space: 1999. The space suits were jumpsuits with the helmets, life support hardware, and so on worn over them. The life support hardware packs - front and back - were numbered. The numerals came from "Data 70". The packs labelled "1" were usually worn by Martin Landau in character as moonbase commander John Koenig when a scene would call for him to expect to do EVA work, and had that numeral inverted. Not sure why.

(There's apparently an argument over whether Data 70 is a knock-off of another font, Westminster. If you're interested, check this essay out.)

More to follow...

Just found out about what looks like an online convention/conference about type as artform, as business, as technology...if you can spare the time. Apparently, it's a free event series to sign up for?

https://typewknd.com/