Visualization
of Typographic Data
Josh Nimoy, Feb 1, 2004
There have been many reasons of technical difficulty for why I
have not been able to pull this off in the past. Now that I finally
sat down and did the proof of concept, I am happy about the programming
triumph. But moreso, I am delighted by the visual outcome.
Click for larger image
It's
important to me as a designer that I have direct control over
the vertices of any typeface. Not only does it provide a clean
way to manipulate the shape, but it also reveals hidden architecture
of the font - information that I find inspiring. Illustrator,
InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Flash are commercial software tools
that will allow the end user to convert a piece of text into vector
outlines for deeper editing. I have always had a problem with
this because it sacrifices the copy-editing capability of that
graphic. With exception to an obscure option in InDesign, the
type just gets converted into raw geometric information and the
string of text that you typed gets lost. In search of a deeper
access to the font's hidden architecture, I did some programming
and produced the above image. In order from top to bottom, the
fonts are Arial, Times, Kroeger, and italicized Courier. They
have been rendered as basic geometric triangles. In order to achieve
this, math was applied to the contour path information parsed
from TrueType files. Triangulation of curvature is important to
architectural building, industrial fabrication, and even in gaming,
where each object must be broken down into such basic parts in
order for the computer to know how to draw it. The resulting renders
are stunning to me since they reveal a secret visual property
of the type - one that is not just serendipitous effects of some
geometry filter. Since this visual step is a subliminal part of
every single time the font gets rendered, I know that the numbers
are passing through this state on their way to solid black. The
image above is not of type with an extra layer of filtering done
to it; it is type with the extra layer not done to it.
I take a particular delight in the almost-symmetry of Kroeger's
S.
At a technical level, this code will make it possible for me to
start merging editable copy interfaces with type-level shape manipulation
- as well as paragraph-level, word level, sentence level, etc.
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