Now with different characters, text prompts, and refined physics…
The Typ09 conference came to a close on Friday and it was a really interesting experience. Type design is a whole world that I didn’t really know much about, considering the fact I’ve been working on NextText for over three years.
It had been a while since I had attended a conference, and although I usually have a problem with the closed bubble around these events, this was very refreshing. It was the first professional conference I attend, and was very different compared to academic ones. A large percentage of speakers focused on specific companies and projects, to the point where it sometimes felt like advertising (and in a sense, it was)
There were presentations on a wide range of topics: type-oriented university programs, focusing on single characters (like accents or quotation marks), web fonts, the step-by-step development of a specific font, etc. It was interesting to see that, much like in other spheres, there is a very prevalent nostalgia on the “old-school”. This could be seen in the many lectures on traditional foundries and handmade fonts.
My two favourite talks were coincidentally about typography in Brazil. Lambe-lambe Letters by Catherine Dixon and Henrique Nardi went through the process of creating posters in a lambe-lambe printshop. The letters are carved out of wooden blocks and printed on wheat paste paper using a manual printer. The movies were compelling; it was captivating to see the process and how spacing is calculated by adding shims between the blocks. Brasil?™ro Project by Crystian Cruz was about the process of designing a font based on hand-lettered signage found in Brazilian cities. It was quite interesting to see a typeface that started on the streets end up in magazines, books, and the web.
We gave our NextText and Mr. Softie workshops today and it went really well. The turnout was a little lower than expected but that ended up being a good thing as we almost had a one-to-one presenter-student ratio. I was a little nervous leading up to the workshops as I realized over the first few days that type designers are not too keen on having their meticulously constructed glyphs tweaked by our software.
The NextText workshop had an extra challenge which was that we had to also teach the basics of programming in that 3-hour slot. It was a lot to cover, but the participants made it through and seemed to have a good handle on things towards the end. A few points to keep in mind for next time:
- When going over the basics of programming, starting with functions before covering variables makes more sense. Functions can be used with literals at first and then variables.
- When building a set of behaviours, it is really helpful to draw the behaviour tree, and to modify it as the code progresses.
- We should have a basic sample sketch for each behaviour to show what it does. This should be included in the documentation, similarly to how it is done in the Processing reference.
- Some of the behaviours should be renamed to something more intuitive.
- We need a simpler way of creating behaviours. Perhaps bringing back the factories would be a good solution for this.
I would be very interested in trying this out again with experienced programmers. This would be ideal to test out the documentation and see how easy it is to understand, navigate, etc. It would also allow more time for free play, resulting in more complex and polished sketches.
The Mr. Softie workshop was a lot of fun and was actually the most time I ever spent in the software. In comparison with NextText, it was easier to grasp as the participants could start working on their visual sketches fairly quickly, and a lot of good looking work came out of it. A good measure of the success was that most people came back after the second break and some even told their friends to pass by and check it out.
- The Textpad is a great tool and has a lot of potential. One feature that would be good to add is to toggle whether white space is sprayed or not.
- The GUI could use a few improvements, mainly swapping the many drop-down menus for sliders, checkboxes, and radio buttons.
I just arrived in Mexico City today and after a short stopover at the hotel, headed downtown to the Typ09 conference.
The presentation layout is one of the best I’ve seen. The talks are given in the interior courtyard of the Museo Interactivo de Econom??a (MIDE). The podium is in the centre of the room and chairs are placed all around. Sixteen screens are installed on the perimeter of the room (four per wall), displaying the presenter’s slides. No matter where you are sitting, you have a good view of the presenter and her presentation. I can’t help but think about Most Pixels Ever and how this is a great setup for a multi-channel installation.
Kevin Larson from Microsoft gave a talk today on how typefaces have personalities and the research behind it. It was an interesting topic, but I felt like it needed more substance. Most of the points seemed obvious and felt like he was preaching to the choir, and the rest could have used actual statistics and data.
I will be teaching a NextText for Processing workshop at ATypI‘s Typ09 conference in Mexico City with Jason Lewis.
The workshop will consist of a presentation of works produced with NextText, an introduction to Processing, an introduction to the NextText library, and the creation of typographic compositions by the participants.
A new version of NextText has been released for the workshop and is available on our Google Code repository. This is a sneak peek of the many new features in the next major revision of the library (which is almost done with testing).
We are also having a Mr. Softie workshop on the same day, led by Bruno Nadeau and Jason Lewis. Mr. Softie is an application for typographic manipulation based on the NextText framework.
The workshops will take place on October 29 at Anahuac University.
For more info:
Computational Typography for Beginners using NextText for Processing
Bending Letterforms with Mr. Softie
Speaker and Presentation Details
Here is a screencast of early physics tests for Big Screams.
I’m working in C++/openFrameworks using the Box2D physics library.
Sara and I developed a program based on Che-Wei and Taylor’s initial idea of following visitors around the space. After the last meeting with Vito, we were most interested in the aesthetic of vertical lines and his concept of doorways opening along the structure.
In our proposal, a beam of light follows a visitor and she walks in front of the white sculpture. If she stays in one place for long enough, the beam of light grows (widens) to reveal her shadow inside a doorway. Visitors can stand next to each other to reveal more of the light images behind these “doorways” or move quickly away to close them.
Shadows being stretched, much like the Corian.
More shadows, but projected on the floor. Links are created between people by stretching the shadows.
Big Screams is an audio-visual piece proposed for the Big Screens setup on the IAC video wall. It is an installation / user-generated performance, where the audience participates by calling a phone number and leaving a message. This message is repeated back in real-time by a bunch of cartoony critters on screen on the speaker system so that everyone in the room can hear it. Many messages can be left (and therefore repeated) at the same time, which will create a rich yet quite odd soundscape, with only bits and pieces of recognizable words. If one person calls, all the critters repeat the message in unison; if two people call, half the critters will repeat one message and the other half will repeat the other; and so on.
Continue reading ‘Big Screams Proposal’
