School so far

I'm not really sure if I can top Grace's post (read below, it's pretty cool), but I thought it was about time that I give an update as to my last month or so at school, so here goes.

Things have been rather busy, with almost all of my day being devoted to school work. That being said, we have managed to get in a few breaks here and there. As a class, we seem to have found comfort in a bar called De Paas, which, as it turns out, has also been a hangout for past students. De Paas is a bar specializing in Belgian Beer and has over 250 types of beer on the menu. Yes, 250! Rather fittingly, the bar is located on a street called Dunne Bierkade. I don't know the exact translation, but I think it means "the beer street". (If I'm wrong, don't correct me).

Anyway, the reason we're both here: school.

Apart from the regular calligraphy and programming excercises that I've been practicing on a daily basis, the main projects we are working on are a monogram based on our two initials, and more recently a bunch of sketching excercises using a little program called the "type cooker". The Type Cooker is something Erik of Letterror put together to output random values from a given list of options related to letterforms. For instance, it could specify the stroke thickness, the serif type, the width, the contrast type, special applications, etc. The idea is to get us to think about and draw letterforms that we would not otherwise think to draw.

I've uploaded a little sketch from one of these excercises below.

They are rather quick sketches, but you can already see a few of the parameters output by the type cooker. The letters had to be very thin in stroke, medium contrast, slab serif and wide.

The other project we've been working on (the main project of the semester) is to make a digital revival of an existing metal typeface used before 1940. The typeface I have to digitize is Plantin, made by the Monotype Corporation in 1913. It was modelled after a late 16th century typeface cut by a man named Robert Granjon. Since part of the project includes a research paper investigating the design context and history of the typeface, I thought it would be interesting to explore the earlier model and compare the two. As seen below, the two typefaces are very different.

The Monotype Plantin typeface is on the right while the earlier 16th century specimen (scanned of course) is on the left. I thought it would be interesting in reviving the Plantin type to reincorporate some of the details of the Granjon type from the 16th century. It's still very much a work in progress, but I've included a snapshot of some very primitive drawings of my Plantin revival here:



You can see the difference in the a where I'm starting to introduce some aspects of the older type back in. The project runs through to mid-January, so there is a lot of work left to do.