On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

I got wind of this via the League of Movable Type newsletter this morning, so it seems a good idea to share this with all of you reading this account. Because Indigenous type resources are part of the Comeback process as outlined by - among others - John Ralston Saul...

https://www.typotheque.com/blog/cherokee-osage-and-the-indigenous-north-american-type-collection

Some of you might be interested in this:

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

Should I sign up for this?

https://2021.typographics.com/typelab/

This book, Letraset: the DIY Typography Revolution, would've been a fun birthday present to get. If I'd known it existed or was going to exist. I first learned of Letraset thanks to high school art classes. It was a revelation about type design, as I had NO CLUE that people designed typefaces for a living. I just knew there were all these different ways of reworking the look of the alphabet, no idea about the infrastructure behind that.

The Letraset catalogues gave me context for those signs on Moonbase Alpha in the first season of Space: 1999 and so much that came before and since then.

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.

This is a thing I've been working on again today.



I'm still trying to make up my mind about upgrading from the software I've been using for this, Typetool 3, to FontLab 7. The makers of the software have a sale running until...midnight tonight, I guess?

Yes, this is one hobby among many for me right now...and I'm uncomfortable about closing this door.

1. I actually got some sketching time - with actual ballpoint pen and paper! - taken care of today. It's been weeks since the last such session!

2. Took in several video presentations during Day Three of Typewknd!

3. Did some housekeeping on my new computer's hard drive, exporting files so that I could clear some space. Before, I had 45-50 GB free space. Now, it's 75-78 GB available.

4. I got an hour's walking exercise in today. Half of it via the shopping errand for newspapers and groceries, the other from walking around the block. Usually, that latter was only three circuits around the block. Today, it was four.

5. Celsys has announced that Clip Studio Paint's got a new update, v.1.10.0, to become available to users starting in four days. Apparently, the big thing is import/export ability re: SVG files. They specifically refer to working with Adobe Illustrator, but we'll soon see if any and all graphic designware that can create SVG files can play nice with this. Corel, Affinity, Inkscape, and whatever else is currently in play, hopefully.

6. Solved my Clip Studio Paint brush size menu problem: it was millimetres vs. pixels. I fiddled with that setting and confused myself as a result. Oops.

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...

1. Got an updated edition of Final Draft. Last time I did so for that software, they were at version 8. Currently, they're on version 11.1.3. Some day, I need to get back to practicing scriptwriting. It was only my best-graded class in Animation for TV at Algonquin, after all.

2. Started fiddling with an old font design project in Typetool 3 tonight after supper. I'm never going to be in the same league as John Roshell, Richard Starkings, or Ray Larabie, but for me, it's a skill I want to get back to (re)learning.

3. Grey and wet has been the day here in Ottawa-Gatineau. I was thinking of going downtown earlier today, but the weather didn't leave me comfortable with that idea.

Thanks to Twitter, I stumbled onto this a few weeks ago. Over on MyFonts, there's a foundry specializing in Aurebesh fonts, too.

https://aurekfonts.github.io/

https://www.myfonts.com/foundry/edds-aurebesh-fontworks/