Brick by brick: News about FontStruct
June 23, 2009 | In News
Yves Peters made public the other day on The FontFeed what many members of the FontStruct community already know – I have recently joined the FontStruct team to take care of user support, promotion of FontStruct on the web & in the real world and publication of content here on “Brick by Brick”.
Today I’m going to write a little bit about the past, present & future of FontStruct and the new plans for “Brick by Brick”, the FontStruct blog.
FontStruct so far
FontStruct was released on the 1st of April 2008. Since then: 167,144 users have registered, 167,305 FontStructions have been created, 7,371 FontStructions have been made public and 317,770 FontStructions have been downloaded.
We have also collected several success stories of FontStructions out in the world, from the use of FontStructions in a huge LED display at the TU Darmstadt to the recent appearance of Sessions in an article on Grain Edit, or the Communication Arts Interactive Annual we received (more about it on The FontFeed).
These are fantastic results for one year of hard work. But we want even more.
FontStruct as an educational resource
So far we have been blogging mainly about FontStruct itself: improvements to FontStructor, examples of FontStructions in use, messages to the FontStruct community etcetera. For the curious and/or mobile FontStructors we now even have a FontStruct channel on Twitter.
But we want you not only to be up-do-date, we want you to be inspired. For this reason, the FontStruct blog’s mission has been re-defined to cover all things related to modular alphabets. Among many possible topics we are specially interested in the use of FontStruct for education in type design.
FontStruct is great for education because it’s free, it’s simple and it’s a lot of fun. It can be used on any computer with a modern browser and Internet access, independently of platform and without installation of additional software. FontStruct stimulates sharing and collaboration, while respecting the creator’s right to decide about it. Users are presented with a set of flexible and familiar Creative Commons licenses to choose from. Peer-review, user votes and the sought after Top Picks complete the package that makes of FontStruct not just a tool, but an exciting environment for learning how to build fonts and design typefaces.
Here are some of the topics we are planning to blog about:
Modular classics
One of the best ways to learn about type design is by looking at samples of work done by masters. We want to select famous modular alphabets – think of Josef Albers’ Kombinationschrift, Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet or classic bitmap fonts such as Susan Kare’s Chicago – and examine them closely. What are the ideas behind the designs? How were the forms constructed? With which modules, on a grid of how many units? In what kind of real-life projects were those letters used?
Modularity in type-design
Type design deals with patterns and repetition of shapes, so it’s natural that there is a lot of modularity in it. A typeface can contain many different types of glyph shapes: different alphabets with upper- and lowercase, numbers, accents, symbols. Each of these groups has its own development history and construction principles. For example, while the typical modulation of latin uppercase characters is based on basic geometric shapes (circle, square and triangle), the typical modulation of lowercase characters is based on more irregular/organic forms produced by the hand. The spacing of a typeface is also generally highly modulated to create a legible and pleasant rhythm for reading.
Each particular style of type – roman or italic, humanist or modern – has its own rules and patterns for standardization and simplification of letter forms. We can also find many examples of modularity when we think about the choice of type sizes, the organization of text and images on a page and the proportions of the page/canvas.
Tips & tricks
While FontStruct is extremely simple and easy-to-use, some of the type designs produced with it can be quite complex and sophisticated. In this section we plan to invite master FontStructors to talk about their tips & tricks to get the most out of FontStruct.
What would you like to read about?
These are just some of our ideas — there is a lot more to come. But we would also like to hear what you think. Is there a topic you would like to read about, and which is not included on our list? We look forward for your suggestions and comments.
June 22, 2009 | In News
Yves Peters has initiated a series of mini-interviews on The FontFeed called Focus on FontStructors. It puts members of our designers community in the spotlight, and introduces them and their FontStructions to a wider audience. The series was started this Sunday with a focus on Afrojet, real name John Skelton, author of many well-crafted and highly usable FontStructions.
It’s a pleasure to know the people and the ideas behind the modules. I look forward to the next post of the series!
June 7, 2009 | In News
We did some maintenance work on the servers today.
During the first year of FontStructing, as the bricks piled up, our servers buckled a few times under the load. This sometimes happened without warning and for days at a time, and caused some understandable annoyance. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment to try and avoid this in the future. A large part of this work is now complete.
What’s changed? Hopefully nothing noticeable ;-) but let us know if you spot any glitches.
Download Problems
Many of you will have noticed problems with downloading more complex FontStructions recently. We’re aware of this and it is next on our list of things to work on.
April 2, 2009 | In News
Regarding recent technical problems …
Update 12. April: Everything should be pretty much back to normal. We’re on a new hosting platform now which should allow us to increase capacity more easily in the future. Thanks for your patience everyone.
P.S. Especially for French users of FontStruct, and thanks to Francine from Brussels, we added a “no-break space” character at the end of the “More Latin” character set.
Update 5. April: All “invisible” FontStructions should now be visible. No data was ever lost, it was just a problem with displaying some larger FontStructions. There are however still some teething problems generally with the performance on the new hosting platform. You may have noticed pages loading slowly. We’re working to improve this as fast as we can.
Original Post 2 April
If you’ve visited FontStruct in the last few days you may have experienced one of the following unpleasantries:
- The site doesn’t load.
- The site loads with a “FontStruct is under maintenance” page.
Fear not. We’re on it. We regret any downtime, but some of these conditions are symptoms of a hardware failure related to our old servers and others are inevitable issues caused by our recent move to a new, more reliable hosting platform. The short story is: everything will get much better very soon.
Some users have expressed concern that their FontStructions are not loading. Let us know if you’re in this camp. We do have backups of all data and we’ll do our best to bring your work back to the most current version possible.
Otherwise, the site is safe and operational. Go ahead and resume regular FontStructing and let us know if you encounter any unexpected behavior. We’ll bring you more info as soon as our tech folks get back from under all the cogs and wires.
March 3, 2009 | In News
Dear FontStructors,
We’ve updated the preview widget used on the gallery pages and elsewhere on the site:
(Above Example: “Penmanship” by “Thalamic” in the sample text mode.)
There are a number of new and improved features which we hope will help you to get a better overview of a FontStruction and to see how it works at different sizes.
Revised Menu
The preview widget now has a “VIEW” menu with three options:
- “All Letters” which is the default, displaying all characters within the FontStruction
- “Sample Text” which shows a standard sample text (for FontStructions with sufficient characters)
- “User Input” which turns the preview widget into a text entry field where you can try typing with the FontStruction
One-Click Pixel Preview
On the left there’s a “PXL” button which will give you a preview of your FontStruction at a one-brick-per-pixel resolution, whichever option you have chosen from the “VIEW” menu.
Interactive Zoom
Between the “PXL” button and the “VIEW” menu, there’s an interactive slider which you can use to view the FontStruction at a range of different sizes.
Vertical Scrolling
On the right, there are scroll buttons which you can use to scroll the text vertically line-by-line.
Larger Preview on FontStruction Homepages
On FontStruction home pages the widget is now taller and will usually show about four lines of letters. There is also an experimental feature: You can drag the bottom right-hand corner of the widget to resize it vertically.
Looking at FontStructions in the new widget is very revealing. The importance of setting an appropriate width for the space character quickly becomes clear. It’s also great to be able to see a more extensive character set more easily. Some designs which may have looked flawed or even dull as an “ABCDEF…” in the old sampler now reveal their true qualities more readily.
We’ve also simplified the embedded version of the widget. It doesn’t have a border anymore so it should be easier to integrate into the design of your blogs and webpages.
Please let us know what you think.
February 4, 2009 | In News
UPDATE: A few users have had problems with this latest upgrade to the FontStructor. The FontStructor doesn’t load properly and it is not possible to edit anything. The solution is to empty your browser cache and then reload the FontStructor page. Thanks to djnippa for pointing out a useful Google help page on how to empty your browser cache. Please get in touch if you have such problems and this solution does not help.
Keyboard shortcuts are now single keystrokes
Before we get to the new stuff, there’s been a change in the way the keyboard shortcuts work in the FontStructor editor. Until now, keyboard shortcuts where mostly in the form Ctrl-Key for Windows users and Shift-Key for Mac users. In some browsers like Internet Explorer they didn’t work at all. It would be nice to have standard keyboard shortcuts like those familiar from desktop software e.g. Ctrl or Cmd-C for copy, but this isn’t possible in many browsers, so we’ve decided to simply drop the extra “modifier” keys (Ctrl, Shift etc.).
Keyboard shortcuts are now single keystrokes e.g. “C” for copy, “V” for paste, “S” for save etc. Most of them haven’t changed, the extra modifier key has just been dropped, and most will continue to work even if you still use the modifier key. A few, like “V” to select the pointer tool have had to change (because of a conflict with “V” for paste). Here’s a full list of the updated keyboard shortcuts.
New Spacing Controls
If you just want to have fun with FontStruct and make a quick font, you can stop reading now. FontStruct is designed to be easy to use, and aims to hide away or simplify many of the things that can make creating a professional font complicated. FontStruct will space the letters you create automatically and add a space character for you.
If however you want more control and the automatic spacing isn’t good enough for your needs then read on.
We’ve added four new features related to control over the space between letters.
Global Spacing Control
First of all, you can now set a single value for the spacing between all letters in your FontStructions. You do this by going to Preview, then selecting “Spacing” from the “Advanced” dropdown menu. This brings up a new palette titled “Spacing”.
Simply drag the slider in this palette to set the spacing for your FontStruction. I think the control is intuitive but for those who want to know exactly what is going on, the numeric value is in grid squares and is added to the width of every letter which by default (see below) is one grid square wider than each drawn letter. A quick way to make all the letters in a font join together, e.g. for a script font, is to set the spacing to -1. Anyway, drag the slider and see.
Monospacing
Many people want to make monospaced FontStructions - font designs in which every letter has the same width, like Courier and other “Typewriter” fonts for example. You can set a single fixed width (monospacing) for every letter in your font by clicking on the “Mono” radio button in the “Spacing” palette and then adjusting the slider. Again the units are grid units. Sorry it’s taken so long fontcollector!
A Space Character
At last! An editable space character. Sometimes people want to actually draw something in the space character slot but many more will want to adjust the space character’s width. The width of the space character in downloaded FontStructions is determined by a formula which doesn’t always produce good results. Now you can set the width of the space and other letters manually using the final new feature:
Adjustable Letter Width
By default, there is an automatic 1-grid square space added to the width of each letter in FontStruct. Now you can set the width of each letter manually. Go to the “Advanced” Menu and choose “Show” and then “Letter Width”. This will make the width of the letter visible as a solid green line. Drag this line to set the width of the letter you are editing. If you want to go back to the default 1-grid square width, click on the little “R” icon to reset the guide and it will start adjusting automatically again. Note that there is a close relationship between the global spacing setting and the adjustable letter width. The global spacing setting value is basically added to the letter width.
There’s a new help page about all these new spacing control features.
Other Changes
Along with these changes, there have been a number of minor optimizations to the FontStructor. The performance of some of the tools and the Preview have been improved.
January 27, 2009 | In News
We’ve added eight new bricks to the FontStructor:
I know people have asked for others but these are the ones that have consistently been asked and argued for. We will add more bricks and brick functionality in a later update to FontStruct.
January 25, 2009 | In News
Building a fine FontStruction can be satisfying. Installing it and creating a sample image in your favorite layout software is exciting. But perhaps the greatest moment of all is when your FontStruction is set free from the monitor and finds its way into a real-world application. As FontStruct grows we are receiving more and more reports of FontStructions in use.
Three FontStructions on a huge LED Display
Last week the Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany revealed its “Welcome Platform”, a new, central forum and entrance point for students, staff, guests and the general public. A permanent part of the building is a huge LED-Display, almost 16 metres in length and on that display, three original FontStructions! They were designed by Daniel Schöps for Fuenfwerken Design AG You can see and read more on Fontblog, or if you’re German’s rusty, you can try a Google translation. View and download the FontStructions here. There are many great FontStructions inspired by LED and LCD display fonts, but it’s wonderful to see someone going the other way and designing an original one for a real client. Check out the hanging numerals.
Thanks to Jürgen Siebert from FontShop Germany for the tip and the blog post.
FontStructions you can pick up and hold
Other known examples of FontStructions in extra-digital use include Afrojet’s wonderful Sawhorse beermats. Even the heraldic graphics are a dingbats FontStruction:
Then there’s Font Fairy’s ingenious popup FontStruction “Solly PopTab” and the rubber stamps created for the Peecso Typographic project by nelloz. In the FontStruct Flickr Pool I even noticed a FontStruction being used as part of a knitting pattern:
Any more?
If you use (or spot) your own or another designer’s FontStruction in a print or otherwise non-screen-based project please upload a photo and let us know.
January 5, 2009 | In News
Dear FontStructors, We are adding a number of new features to the FontStruct website today.
Homepages
The first one is a homepage for every user. This is a public version of your MyFontStruct page with a list of your shared FontStructions, and some customizable information about yourself. When you click on a user’s name in the gallery or elsewhere, you will now be taken to this page. This is a much better and more reliable option than the page of search results which you currently see.
So now you have your own unique FontStruct internet address (http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/fontstructors/yourusername) which you can use anywhere and everywhere as a reliable reference to your work on FontStruct.
As well as a listing of your FontStructions, the homepage also includes a ‘Profile’ page which by default shows some information about your participation in FontStruct. You can also place your own URL on this page to promote your private website, your business or another project, and there’s an option to display some additional information about yourself if you wish.
With the number of FontStructions in the gallery growing daily we hope that new features like this will help in allowing your work to stand out from the crowd.
Of course there are RSS news feeds for each user’s homepage. By subscribing to these feeds you can easily keep up to date with your favourite designers’ work.
Messaging
Registered users can now send short private text-only messages to other users. Many users have asked for such a feature which may be familiar from other social networking websites.
Some reasons people have given when requesting a feature like this are:
- To ask a designer whether their FontStruction can be used commercially.
- To contact designers because they are interested in working with them.
- To collaborate with other users on a FontStruction project.
To send a message to another FontStructor, go to their homepage (e.g. by clicking on their name next to one of their FontStructions) and click on the contact button next to their avatar. Then fill out the form to send the message.
You can configure the messaging system to suit your needs. For example, you can opt out of the system completely, or you can choose not to receive email notifications when messages arrive. Their is also a spam reporting mechanism which, along with other precautions, should help us prevent abuse of the system.
Redesign of MyFontStruct
Along with the new user homepages and the messaging system, MyFontStruct has been rearranged into a series of tabs.
There are also a few new settings. Under the “Profile” tab for example, there is a new option to show your “real name” instead of your FontStruct username on your user homepage. while under the “Settings” tab, and then “Messaging and Notifications” you’ll see the new settings for the messaging system.
Under “Profile” and then “Delete Profile” there is also now an option to delete your FontStruct profile completely. Yes, occasionally people really do ask for this!
What’s next?
The next feature to be added will almost certainly be additional control over spacing in the FontStructor (i.e. the right side-bearing and finally a space character).
Apart from that, keep your suggestions and bug reports coming. Even if they are not acted upon immediately or soon or ever, they are all taken seriously. The majority of them are turned into tickets in our internal tracking system where we plan and prioritize the development of FontStruct.
(teaser image on the front page features sweet home by mippo)
December 15, 2008 | In News
Our main server bit off one more brick than it could chew on Saturday, and gave up the ghost for good. This is why FontStruct has been unavailable for the last two days.
Anyway, we’re back up now on a shiny, new, wide-eyed, fresh-faced machine. So gather your bricks and tools, open your mind to the infinite mysteries of the grid, and let’s FontStruct!
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