Dr Wouter Soudan

This month, I’m turning forty. Suitable occasion to look back at my work in type… #typedesign #portfolio

Jarig.

Jarig.

Jarig.

Jarig.

@y_haralambous Surely that scribe must have been a student of Card. Ximenes’s polyglot ;-)

Graffiti from a desk at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University. Accent missing, breathing correct.

@tsmullaney @TiroTypeworks @aaronbell @FredSmeijers on the relativity of puchcutting in that bygone world: ‘proportions are very important, but smooth outlines, no, I am not going to waste my time on that.’ (youtu.be/RhCLyea8QjY @ ~52') In watch making minute mechanical accuracy matters, in type not that much.

@aaronbell Yes exactly. Perhaps the simplest way would be for a lecturer to say: Listen, the world in which this practice lived originally is gone, which is why it’s going to seem so unbelievable. The practice still exists but the world in which it was born is gone.

Type historians need to stop fetishizing punchcutting as something unimaginably complex.

@TiroTypeworks @celiason @rosettatype @mbutterick A peculiar idea indeed. Which begs the question about Morison’s own conversion to (Old) Catholicism. And Gill’s. At least these three may already show that religious beliefs are less clear-cut than denominations. Our crystal goblet, by any other name, have the Word shine as well.

@celiason @rosettatype @mbutterick Bath also discusses Morison's peculiar idea that the austere quality of Bodoni's typography was influenced by Jansenism.

@bsb_muenchen Vielen Dank, dann mache ich es so!

@rhythmvs Hallo Herr Soudan, könnten Sie sich mit Ihrem Anliegen bitte direkt an unsere Handschriftenabteilung wenden: handschriften@bsb-muenchen.de Beste Grüße, Social Media Team der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek

@bsb_muenchen Die Handschrift BSB Clm 364 (15. Jh) wurde noch nicht digitalisiert, oder ist immerhin nicht online verfügbar; opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/search?oclcno=…). Bevor ich Kopien über ERaTo bestelle: können Sie mir vielleicht ein Bild von f°7 zeigen, oder ff°116–126r? Danke!

@typeoff @typolis Do you have an ISBN or bibliographic address? What’s the imprint called?

@typolis I met him another time in his flat, with his son and two guests from the Netherlands. I really quite like the monograph his son’s publishing house published about him. That book is a must-read and a must-own, for every German-speaking designer East and West.

Axel Bertram (*1936), a graphic designer whose work determined East German society’s visual appearance, has past away. FontFont let me interview him a few years ago, which was great fun (ilovetypography.com/2013/04/06/soc…). I guess that FF Videtur’s italics will never get published now 😔😢

Besides the notebooks & piles of loose-leaf napkin sketches, there’s also drafts for chapters of my book on type. First writing dates back to when I was simultaneously working on a multi-script Scotch Roman revival. (Astronomical symbols were fun!) [12] — twitter.com/rhythmvs/statu…

Once well into font development, I started architecting a new editor, where type metrics would take center stage. Mockups for standardized specimens included input values for parameterizable glyph drawing and showed the output of curve analysis. [11] — twitter.com/rhythmvs/statu…

@typographer Maybe because in numismatics ℏ = ħ? After all, it’s about a constant, isn’t it? ;-)

Lovely, but why not observe the convention of using italic for letters used as symbols in equations? – his tombstone does media.gettyimages.com/videos/stephen…

@textfiles Thank you!

If you don't like this collection, we're not friends archive.org/details/wichar…

@hhpapazian @kateo @vgcerf @timberners_lee Of which both are a symptom, burking outright, as they do, their less complacent and silenced co-founders, Doug Engelbart e.a., Robert Cailliau. There the true inventors, here but merchands marketing the invention as if it were their own.

@kateo @vgcerf @timberners_lee Both of them in denial of the core problem: Capitalism. Their silence makes them complicit.

@hyphenpress That book was an eye opener: I cherish the copy I got, back then. Thank you!

@isoletters Belgian lettering… Interestingly, in his Essay, Eric Gill shows about the same deadly sin (figs 12–13).

When you look at this sign on a big screen, everything is easy to read. But when you look at the timeline thumbnail on your phone, this may come closer to what I saw in real life. The first four letters in the top line seemed identical. Rounded or angular – that is the question.

After promotion, the time of commuting began, while I started scribbling down field notes, ideas about letters, their shape, proportion, spacing, fitting. Meanwhile, it has become quite a pile—enough to once fill a book. [10] — twitter.com/rhythmvs/statu…

Here’s my dissertation’s full-text: academia.edu/708761/Normati… — (I’ll put the source on Github too.)

I must confess that I often was carried away by the typography of the primary literature I was doing the PhD on, rather than dealing with its contents. In the end, 𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗 appealed more to me than arcane theories of metaphysical aesthetics. [9] — twitter.com/rhythmvs/statu…