daniele capo

This is what I am doing now:

• the big table of counters
• one serif inspired by (more than) one typophile discussion about Legato
• one grotesk typeface
• reading 18th Brumaire of L. Napoleon by Karl Marx

The big table of counters

I started ‘studying’ (is there any irony quotation mark?) the problem of counters after reading Smeijers Counterpunch. Initially I tried to draw starting from inside but, as usual for me, I felt tired, so I started thinking that it could be more interesting drawing free forms and then treat it like counters. In the middle I find other interesting ideas:

• A parametric font editor based on counterpunches.
• Starting the design phase not from single glyphs but from an undifferentiated black row. You need to erase part of the row to generate patterns, then by an elimination process you select interesting lines, and you construct letter shapes from that. In that way the spacing/kerning process disappears: letters emerge from a flow.

And at the end I started to draw the big table of counters, a combination game that has 625 entries. Above you see an image.

one serif

This one emerged in my mind from this discussion on typophile. The whole point in Legato seems to be the opposite movements of external and internal contours. The black part of the o is slanted forward while the counters is almost vertical, and maybe the stability of the counters balance the leaning of the black, creating a tension. I often draw when I try to understand something, and this is what I ‘thought’.

one grotesk

18th Brumaire

I’m reading this pamphlet for a reason. In Italy, with regular intervals, you find someone who quotes ‘il 18 brumaio’. Why? Well, if you read it (and you have to, if only to learn how to be sarcastic), you will understand it immediately (but first you have to take a crash course in italicology.)