TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Mon Apr 15 05:47:47 EDT 2024

FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE

LUC DEVROYE

ABOUT

Open Source Publishing (or: OSP) [Harrisson]

Free software project based in Belgium and run by four people (and I quote from their web page):

• Harrisson: Graphic designer and typographer, based in Liege and Brussels. Started to use as much Open Source software as possible on his Macintosh, as part of a research project The Tomorrow Book at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht.
• Pierre Huyghebaert: Exploring for eighteen years several practices around graphic design, he currently drives his own studio Speculoos. Interested to use free sofware to re-learn to work in others way and collaboratively on cartography, type design, web interface, schematic illustration, teaching and book design.
• Nicolas Malevé: Systems- and software developer from Brussels with a long interest in the politics and practice of software. Uses Linux since 1998 and makes publishing- and distribution systems for collaborative work.
• Femke Snelting: Graphic designer and artist based in Brussels. Most of her current work is for the web. Recently switched to Linux after using Apple Macintosh for more than ten years.

• Alfphabet (2009). Based on the Belgian road signage system in use from 1945 until 1975. It came from Minneapolis to Brussels with 3M.
• Broodthaers.
• Cimatics (2009). Totally experimental. This font was designed in July 2009, for the graphic identity of Cimatics A\V Platform. It gathers glyphs from FreeSerif, FreeSerifItalic, DejaVuSans, DejaVuSerif, the OSP_frog mascot, the Cimatics two piece heart, a baronchon_palm_tree from Open Clip Art Library and private use dingbats drawn for Cimatics (Cimatics_scare_eye, white_pentagon).
• Crickx. A digital reinterpretation of a set of adhesive letters.
• Distilled Spirit and Whisky Jazz. In September 2009, Harrisson and Jean Baptiste Parre from LPDME remixed URW Gothic (Avant Garde) and published the free fonts Distilled Spirit and Whisky Jazz.
• DLF. DLF stands for Dingbats Liberation Fest.
• Libertinage. In August 2008, Harrisson designed 26 variations on Philipp H. Poll's 2006 font Libertine, and called the new family Libertinage. It covers Greek, Latin and Cyrillic.
• Limousine. This font was made for a poster to support nine people accused of "criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity". They were arrested the 11th of November 2008, in France. They and others are the victims of a witch-hunt where the word "terrorism" was applied to any idea or practice which challenges the status quo. An international movement is emerging in their support. For the poster, we re-mixed an open font, the Free Sans from Free UCS Outline Fonts. Open Font Library link.
• Logisoso. Logisoso is a reinterpretation of the Delhaize logo lettering.
• NotCourierSans. NotCourierSans is a reinterpretation of Nimbus Mono and was designed in Wroclaw at the occasion of Linux Graphics Meeting (LGM 2008). We took Nimbus as the base of the design. We proceeded to remove the serifs with raw cuts. We did not soften the edges. We are not here to be polite.
• OSP-DIN (2009). The first cut of OSP-DIN was drawn for the festival Cinema du réel.
• Polsku Regula (2010). Polsku Regula is inspired by polish signage, street signs and shop windows lettering.
• Reglo (2011) was used for the new identity of Radio Panik.
• Sans Guilt (2011). The three Sans Guilt fonts have been produced during "Read The Fucking Manual", an OSP workshop at Deparment 21 (Royal College of Art), using Gimp, Fonzie and Fontforge. They are different versions of Gill Sans based on three different sources. Sans Guilt MB: based on a rasterized pdf made with the Monotype Gill Sans delivered with Mac OSX. Sans Guilt DB: Based on early sketches by Eric Gill Sans Guilt LB: Based on lead type from Royal College of Arts letterpress workshop. Open Font Library link.
• Univers Else (2010-2012). A geometric sans, about which they write: Univers Else is an experiment, a first attempt to escape the post ’80 era of geometrical purity that is so typical of Postscript vector based font drawing. The shapes of Univers Else were obtained from scanning printed textpages that were optically composed by cheap phototypesetting machines in the sixties and seventies. Some of Univers Else beautiful features are: round angles, floating baselines, erratic kerning. More precisely in this case, George Maciunas of the Fluxus group used an IBM composer (probably a Selectric typewriter) for most of his own work, and as a former designer, for all Fluxus work. In the 1988 book Fluxus Codex, kindly given to Pierre Huyghebaert by Sylvie Eyberg, the body text is typeset in a charmingly rounded and dancing Univers that seems to smile playfully at its dry swiss creator. Different scans were assembled by Grégoire Vigneron following different grids. These huge bitmaps were processed with appropriate potrace settings by the Fonzie software* through a .ufo font format as a working format, and an OpenType as output. Some testing and fine-tuning was done by Pierre Marchand, Delphine Platteeuw and Pierre Huyghebaert in FontForge and the font was ready, in a finished state enough to typeset the book. The oblique versions was simply slanted on the fly.
• VJ12 (2009).
• W Droge. In 2008, they ran a workshop in Wroclaw, Poland, to design a font in a day with the free tools Inkscape, Gimp and FontForge---called W Droge. It was based on Polish traffic signs. Cooperation with Dave Crossland, Alexandre Prokoudine and Nicolas Spalinger. The designers were Malwina Pukaluk, Marcin Wajda, Anna Bartoszek, Kacper Lenczuk, and Ludivine Loiseau.
• Le Patin Helvète (2011) is a slab typeface derived from Nimbus L. It covers Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Hebrew: Patin Helvete is a attempt to turn the slick propergol purity of the modernist lines back to the coal dirt of the iron horse by going backward in time and space through little pieces of rail. Designed by Harrisson, Ludi Loiseau and Sebastien Sanfilippo.
• Mill (2012) is an architectural style typeface that has been created for engraving building instructions into the wood of a bench.
• Sans Guilt Wafer (2012) is described by OSP as follows: Gill Sans eats a Gaufrette.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Open Source Publishing (or: OSP)
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search

INTERNAL LINKS
Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿ The Belgian type scene ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Type designers ⦿ Bezier curves ⦿ Typewriter fonts ⦿ Dingbats (original) ⦿ Map/Travel dingbats ⦿ Avant Garde typefaces ⦿ DIN ⦿ Open source fonts ⦿ Architectural lettering/typefaces ⦿ Greek/Coptic ⦿ Cyrillic type design ⦿ Hebrew font links ⦿ Courier and derived typefaces ⦿ Letterpress ⦿ Eric Gill and his typefaces ⦿