Soquili TG - A new collaborative font project.

As a tribute to Bill Taylor ( Soquili) we are going to start a new collaborative font project. The font will be called Soquili TG, and as many of you knew Bill was part Native American, and soquili is a Native American word for horse. The font will be a picture font containing images of Native American art and patterns, that Gary Bouton has rounded up for us.

As we did with the Burgeon font we will need to trace these images and then they will be made into a font. This project is open to anyone who would like to participate. We will need volunteers to trace the glyphs and if anyone has experience using Font Lab to create fonts I'm sure that Gary Bouton would appreciate the help with that part of the process.

The font will be released under a SIL Open Font License and will require volunteers to post the following release with your full name and location. Copy and paste the release and change my information with yours, and post it in this thread. If anyone would prefer not to post their full name on the forum, you can post the release here with your screen name and PM either myself or Barbara Bouton with the release with your full name. And yes you have to post the release again even if you participated in a previous font collaboration project.

I, Frances Proctor, as a contributor to the project undertaken by a group in the TalkGraphics.com Fonts and Typography Forum, to create the following font, Soquili TG, grant a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute [the] Contributions I made to the work and such derivative works.

I understand that this is a license agreement only; it does not transfer copyright ownership and does not change my rights to use the artwork I contributed for any other purpose.

Frances Proctor, BC, Canada


Once we have an idea of how many volunteers we will have we will divide up the images, Gary has found over 80 images for us to use! :)

I, Larry Leiker, as a contributor to the project undertaken by a group in the TalkGraphics.com Fonts and Typography Forum, to create the following font, Soquili TG, grant a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute [the] Contributions I made to the work and such derivative works.

I understand that this is a license agreement only; it does not transfer copyright ownership and does not change my rights to use the artwork I contributed for any other purpose.

Larry Leiker, Missouri, USA

I Christine Farrelly, as a contributor to the project undertaken by a group in the TalkGraphics.com Fonts and Typography Forum, to create the following font, Soquili TG, grant a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute [the] Contributions I made to the work and such derivative works.

I understand that this is a license agreement only; it does not transfer copyright ownership and does not change my rights to use the artwork I contributed for any other purpose.


Christine

I, Gary David Bouton, as a contributor to the project undertaken by a group in the TalkGraphics.com Fonts and Typography Forum, to create the following font, Soquili TG, grant a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute [the] Contributions I made to the work and such derivative works.

I understand that this is a license agreement only; it does not transfer copyright ownership and does not change my rights to use the artwork I contributed for any other purpose.

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To All: it would really help if you put the glyphs you trace on different pages, on per page, of about the same height, about 10" is good, and do not use Layers, as I've missed glyphs in the past because the layers are locked or hidden.

I wish us good luck finding someone as good as Bill was with FontLab, too. You folks are just going to have to limp along with yours truly on the coding part.

-g

Thanks, Larry, Christine, and Gary. I'm thinking to give a couple more days for volunteers to step forward and then we can start dividing up the glyphs.

Can I ask?

Are we talking about tracing the glyphs that are included in the file called 'Native American art motifs.xar' ?

We will be tracing some glyphs from a .xar file that Gary Bouton has provided me that is labled Native American Art Motifs. The file contains a series of jpeg images of art motifs from several different Native American Cultures. Gary has assured me that the glyphs are fine for us to use.

Are you going to volunteer Rik? We would certainly welcome your participation :)

I, Rik Datta, as a contributor to the project undertaken by a group in the TalkGraphics.com Fonts and Typography Forum, to create the following font, Soquili TG, grant a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute [the] Contributions I made to the work and such derivative works.

I understand that this is a license agreement only; it does not transfer copyright ownership and does not change my rights to use the artwork I contributed for any other purpose.

Rik Datta, Reading, UK
********
Hi Frances.
I would love to help with this. As I've not been involved in previous projects, I just wanted to understand what's involved.
There are days I get very busy and other days when I could certainly do some worthwhile work.

Frances—

I've had a chance to think about the plans here for a font so far, and to me it's turned into not such a good idea for a few reasons:

First, Steve Ledger told Barbara last week that Bill was part Cherokee. So forget all the art I sent to you; none of it is Cherokee artwork.

You can't just go doing a font with Native America patterns in it and call it a tribute to Bill Taylor. That's like lumping the Irish, the Scottish, Brits, and Australians together. Except for the US Government enforcing some territories on our Native Americans, there was no one single "Nation". In New York State alone, there are the Onondaga, the Seneca (who run the Turning Stone casino just north of here), the Mohawk, and the Massapequa originally in the Long Island area. My own ancestry includes a member of the Massapequa.

So I really, sincerely, honestly encourage all of us—that if you want to make a typeface in honor of Bill, that you do some hours of research on what the Cherokee Nation created for patterns on home goods, weapons, and other markings intrinsic to the tribe.

I do know for a little research that there was a concentration of the tribe in Oklahoma during and after the US treaty with them, and there was also a treaty in 1888 in North Carolina with the Cherokee Nation.

This font deserves authenticity and accuracy. You can't begin with volunteers, I don't believe.

You need to begin with research.

Here's a link to some historic basket-weave patterns of the Cherokee of N. Carolina:

Cherokee basketweave patterns

Spark any ideas?

My Best,

Gary

Your help and contributions will certainly be welcome and much appreciated Rik, thanks :) Counting Gary, and myself we are now up to 5 volunteers :)

For Rik and anyone who would like to participate but is not sure what is involved, I'm going to give about 2 more days for volunteers to come forward(I also need to put in some time with real life business work) then I'll start dividing up the images and you will each get a jpeg image containing about 10 images or so. You will need to trace the images with the shape tool, making sure to keep the number of nodes to a minimum.

Have a look through this thread in which we created the burgeon ornaments it will give you an idea of how this project will progress.

Edit: I missed Gary's post and while all are still welcome to volunteer, we will put off actually starting any work until we have researched and decided on appropriate artwork to properly honour Bill.

If anyone wants to research and post ideas all are welcome :)

I thought I would have a go at the Seal Of The Cherokee Nation, as practice.
Does someone want to have a look at the .xar file and tell me what is required, to produce the sort of work that can then be used in the font.
What's wrong with it? What needs attention? etc...

Also, would the leaves and the 7-point star need to be transparent or solid?

Then when we do start work on the font, more time can be spent on producing good quality work.
Or, I can wait till we all start.

It would be hard to tell anything from the PNG Rik we would need to see a .xar file and Gary would be the best one to look at that, but lets not start posting .xar files just yet we need to do some research and come up with ideas and we can't just publish things with out being sure we aren't violating any copyrights. Once we have found appropriate source material and any needed permissions have been secured then we can move forward.

The Cherokee Seal might be nice but first some research needs to be done to see if it is copyrighted and if we can get permission to use it.

This has little to do with the typeface at the moment, but as Rik has requested, here's what one needs to create a glyph in a typeface:

• I realize it's hard to count, but ideally, a glyph should have no more than 200 control points. More, and it just slows the user down when they type with it. Understand that fonts are little runtime programs and the operating system needs to run the fonts.

• A glyph should be one shape, not two, not groups of shapes. You'd use the Shapes>Combine Shapes menu item.

• Lines aren't valid. All areas in a gylph have to be a shape, so if you designed a glyph with lines, you need to Convert line to Shape.

• Color makes no difference. I'll take a brown or a red glyph. The black you see when you type is the shape and white is clear, the absence of a shape in any given area.

I think those are the "biggies". If there are minor problems, I can fix them when I compile the font.

You know, those basketweave patterns looked quite handsome and would be useful in certain design situations. If I had the time, I'd play with the patterns, and see if there was an ideal style that lent itself to a glyph in a typeface. I've seen Rococo, Venetian, French-inspired from Art Nouveau, but I've never seen a Native American pattern glyph. I'm certain the Cherokee Nation has produced some visually stunning pattern work.

-g

I don't know whether you've seen the Cherokee Font - expect you have. I remember Bill posting something about this a couple of years ago.

I myself have never seen it before John posted the link; thank you, John. But I recommend that we don't go anywhere near an actual tribal alphabet to honor Bill, because we'd need to research the context of not only the glyphs, but also the native language. Here's an example of the Digohweli typeface; I've entered some characters from the Unicode extended range. They are cast in a Roman style, but the non-English characters are wonderfully artistic and remind me a little of Saxon runes and alchemy symbols.

Attachment 93598

No, I feel strongly that to honor Bill Taylor with a font that represents some of his heritage, we need to go symbolic, generalizing what we present, and proceed with a hunility based on the fact that none of us will really understand what was in Bill's mind and spirit any better than we did the day he passed on.

My Best,

Gary

Barbara had an excellent idea for creating and dedicating a typeface to Bill Taylor’s memory.

She’s thinking outside of the box.

Instead of patterns or Cherokee glyphs…Bill’s nym on tg is “Soquili”…”horse”.

One of the most famous series of horse pictures is Edward Muybridge’s motion study of a jockey riding a horse. The images are Public Domain (this study is over 100 years old, 1878), and what I did with this animated GIF is just take the guy off the horse. I think the imagery itself has a sort of majesty and magic, a fitting dedication, I feel.

Attachment 93754

So what about we re-render this motion study as vector art, and make each frame into a font character? Make the mane flowing, remove the saddle, make the artwork free and untethered.
And then we show people how to type each character on a frame in Xara to recreate the motion study?

I feel strongly that overall, it would be an inspired effort that matches Bill’s tireless spirit.

My Best,

Gary

I love this idea!

Very cool idea. I like it. This would be like no other font that I know of.

Our Administrator has a unique vision here. ;)

"Soquili.otf" might be not simply a stencil font of different horse postures as it goes through a gallop, but each gylph would be a frame in a potential animation.

So it's more than a typeface, just as Bill was more than a tg Moderator to all of us.

I can help make this happen, but I'd like my role to be the guy who evaluates the project from an animation point of view: how well the gylphs work together both as artistic glyphs you can use to make patterns and borders and also how easily the glyphs can be used by the average Xara artist to make a swf or AVI file.

I PM'ed Frances that I have the highest resolution files from Edward Muybridge’s early photography. If we all agree, I can begin by cleaning up the frames for manual tracing.

I have some, but not an extraordinary amount of time between Christmas and New Year's Eve'.

Votes, all?

My Best,

Gary

Sounds great! This sounds like the best course of action to me.

I think this will be a very good way to honour Bill's memory. Gary and I have discussed doing the horse in silhouette, to simplify the glyphs. It will be very important for us to maintain consistency with the glyphs or the animation won't work, and each glyph should be artistically pleasing for use as borders clipart etc. And as it now stands Gary is the only one who will be doing the coding work so when he is ready he will set specifications for size etc and will give us an example of what he will need.

If there is anyone who has experience with font creation programs (Gary uses Font Lab) I'm sure Gary would love to hear from you! :)

In Gary's words;

think,
Spirit.
Art.
Beauty.
Eternity.

A Day's End Report

I believe I wasted a little time because (again, again) I wasn't thinking outside of the box.

Attached are two frames that I retouched to remove the rider from the horse. These are about the best still images anyone offers on the web, from the motion studies of Edward Muybridge. It didn't take me long to trace one, but you know what?

Attachment 93761

We can do better, and really should, for Bill's sake.

So what I have here is a Poser horse (the DAZ Millennium horse, actually) in two different still poses. This is a LOT easier to trace, and because I can light the thing with edge lighting (as I taught in November in the video tutorial) we could Threshold the poses and make a more visually intricate typeface.

Attachment 93762


I'm exactly $14 from getting motion tracks for the model so it will leap, gallop, and do about 7 other pacing motions. This would fill the character slots for the font, you know? What I'd like to do is ask our 3D Moderators if they can think of a better approach. I did give this some thought, but perhaps gidget or Mike might see a better still way to arrive at our goal. If not, I'm going to get the motion tracks, apply them, and then present the group with an animation—that if you approve it—I'll break it down into assignment-sized frames and we could in theory get to work by the New Year.

the animation tracks shown on youTube
I can pose the frames better than the YouTube example.

My Best,

Gary

Sounds like a winner to me. (pun intended)

Christine

I messed around with a lot of different models, moving at different speeds today.

The main and tail will have to be creatively designed or I'll have to go back and take some Poser lessons because I gave up trying to key and independently animate these areas after an hour of futile labor! It's not hard to modulate the location of the tail; if you get stuck, I can lend a hand on these areas of the glyphs.

In an hour or so, I'll post a few frames from all of this, along with one of my own traces, and let's see if everyone can get a feel for creating a horse silhouette glyph, okay?

It has to be one path, although you can combine shapes, and it must be closed.

My Best,

Gary

How do we feel about these three frames and the try I made at tracing off one?

-g

Attachment 93782

Attachment 93783

Attachment 93784

I like the horse it's self but would it be possible for us to do the tail and mane in a similar manner as this? http://www.artworkandprinting.com/ga...decal-60-p.asp

I think that maybe we should have a design for the tail and main that can be used as a guide. That is it would be pre designed and fitted to each glyph so we can maintain the consistency but still get the movement when it's used as an animation.

Those look good Gare.
Here is a video showing horses running and their tails moving around. Does this help?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXIabr0-QOc

Hi Larry—

The video you link out to helps a little.

Clearly, you folks need a complete frame from which to draw; the project will never get done in bits and pieces.

I think I have a solution to provide our group with complete frames of a horse galloping, with a natural progression in the mane and tail areas.

I'm going to hand rig these parts, render an animation separate from the torso, and then use After Effects to wed the two animations.

This is not going to happen overnight!

Stay tuned in early 2013 (which isn't that far off)—

Gary

I, Stephen Whittle, as a contributor to the project undertaken by a group in the TalkGraphics.com Fonts and Typography Forum, to create the following font, Soquili TG, grant a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sub-license, and distribute [the] Contributions I made to the work and such derivative works.

I understand that this is a license agreement only; it does not transfer copyright ownership and does not change my rights to use the artwork I contributed for any other purpose.

Stephen Whittle, Manchester, England.

I Frank Wognum, as a contributor to the project undertaken by a group in the TalkGraphics.com Fonts and Typography Forum, to create the following font, Soquili TG, grant a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute [the] Contributions I made to the work and such derivative works.

I understand that this is a license agreement only; it does not transfer copyright ownership and does not change my rights to use the artwork I contributed for any other purpose.