Hi!
Pumpernickel was made as a result of a little christmas game:
Thanx for the advice, Hrant, and thanx for the response, Coles.
Uploaded a flash 4 file. Hope it will do the works.
By the way: how do you get those thumbnails/portraits along with the signature data? - do we have to be members of the country club to get those?
Regards,
T + L
pumpernickel_specimen.swf (20.8 k) |
Sorry for the big gif but I wished to show you how odd this can became with a text face.
Note the uncial f.
By the way, I love Pumpernickel. I started some ten years ago something very similar, scanning household items and found objects, but I dropped it. Pumpernickel is really prettier than Paul Elliman's Bits, for example (in an issue of FUSE).
I would love to work on a collaborative face like Silentmail. I would just try to keep more control (in Silentmail each following student was allowed to look only at the previous six characters and not at the whole).
Thank you, Tor.
I don't know Elliman so much, but here's Bits, from FUSE issue 15. I recalled it worse.
Actually it's very good as Pumpernickel. It rocks, too. Besides, it's been one of the first (if not the first) face designed with found objects.
It has a pretty complete character set, which is unusual for a FUSE face.
Silentmail inspires me a lot. I would like to attempt a cooperative text face, using better starting rules.

> [I have two "definitions" of text fonts. One is closer to yours is related to book usage, the other includes experiments which eventually someone could dare to use in text, like my Neoritmo. I talked with Nick Shinn about this and he shares my idea. His Merlin, for example, is conceived as a text face, albeit overcharged with decoration. And I think his intention with Fontesque was the same, although Fontesque really does not work.]
Hrant first (like Women and Child ;)
I have not explained myself well. I meant Fontesque does not work if we consider it in what I called faces for book usage.
As far as we are in my second and generic category (experiments for someone who might dare to use in text) many faces work at different degrees depending on how much you dare and on the complessive length of the text.
An example is the use of Outwest as a textface in Emigre 28. I find it fantastic but it could turn your stomach upside down. And it's not for book usage. So I just meant that, if you're very daring Merlin could even be used in a book but Fontesque probably not.
It all depends on the context to me.
For Tor: thank you!
I should have to see if objects I found for my old Gerümpel are still there. Then we may extablish proportions and start digitizing and make selections for the lowercases (I always start from the more problematic lowercases).
As for the sound project: do you know Voxel by Joshua Distler at Shift?: it's not what you are proposing but it's an experiment linking sound to graphic forms. I have it, Joshua is a friend of mine. You may see Voxel here:
http://www.shiftype.com/
About your idea: short sounds but... any kind of sound? I like the idea but I find the found objects one more fun!
Send me a private mail from my profile page.
Cheers!
Tor, if you're itching to do this type of project again, I'm sure you'd have no shortage of response here in recruiting collaborators.
If you have a fresh idea on how a group of people could design a collaborative typeface, by all means, let's hear it.
Did you ever see our Smaller Picture project?
One attempt at typographic baton passing: Chinese Whispers.
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