RegularFont is a project started in 2017 at a workshop that has taken different forms over the past few years due to my lack of programming skills and evolves as new things come to me.
The very first version of the font was made a year after the workshop with processing and lot of time spent treating and cleaning the letters one by one.
The project was put on hold until april 2022 when I had more free time and skills to do what I wanted and is now as much a tool as a typeface family.
Basic principles consist in framing each letter on a grid and redistributing its's black matter on the outline of each square of it.
This redistribution creates a visual effects where the size of the typeface display has a strong influence on our possiblity to read the letters. From the abstraction of the large letters to the legibility of the small one. From the abstraction of a single letter to the legibility of a group of some. Despite the difference from thoses font display's technology, there is some visual connection than can be made between this letters and something called subpixel rendering, hinting or even Font rasterization.
Subpixel rendered lower case
A font test without hinting (upper rows)
and with hinting (lower rows)
Rasterization with anti-aliasing without hinting Designed to allow a rendering close to what was imagined by the typographer even with low screen resolutions, these technologies nevertheless deliver an interesting object in their real and not perceived rendering.
If the question of perception and reduction is in these cases of a technical nature, it is also found at the core of certain projects or approaches to type design for different reasons, as is the case, without wanting to be too exhaustive, for Muir McNeil's TenPoint or Dwiggins' M-Formula.
These questions could also be approached through the prism of print technologies and the objects they produce, but there is no question here of trying to weave all the links existing between the different projects. But rather to contextualize a bit what pushed me to develop a little more this project which was at the base only a simple experimentation (and still is in a way). There are still many details to be worked out on the different typefaces generated. For these reasons, the project is likely to evolve or change over time, to be enriched or not...
The very first version of the font was made a year after the workshop with processing and lot of time spent treating and cleaning the letters one by one.
The project was put on hold until april 2022 when I had more free time and skills to do what I wanted and is now as much a tool as a typeface family.
Basic principles consist in framing each letter on a grid and redistributing its's black matter on the outline of each square of it.
This redistribution creates a visual effects where the size of the typeface display has a strong influence on our possiblity to read the letters. From the abstraction of the large letters to the legibility of the small one. From the abstraction of a single letter to the legibility of a group of some. Despite the difference from thoses font display's technology, there is some visual connection than can be made between this letters and something called subpixel rendering, hinting or even Font rasterization.
Subpixel rendered lower case
A font test without hinting (upper rows)
and with hinting (lower rows)
Rasterization with anti-aliasing without hinting Designed to allow a rendering close to what was imagined by the typographer even with low screen resolutions, these technologies nevertheless deliver an interesting object in their real and not perceived rendering.
If the question of perception and reduction is in these cases of a technical nature, it is also found at the core of certain projects or approaches to type design for different reasons, as is the case, without wanting to be too exhaustive, for Muir McNeil's TenPoint or Dwiggins' M-Formula.
These questions could also be approached through the prism of print technologies and the objects they produce, but there is no question here of trying to weave all the links existing between the different projects. But rather to contextualize a bit what pushed me to develop a little more this project which was at the base only a simple experimentation (and still is in a way). There are still many details to be worked out on the different typefaces generated. For these reasons, the project is likely to evolve or change over time, to be enriched or not...
