Soquili TG - A new collaborative font project.

[Gare]

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.



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

[Gare]

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.



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

[angelize]

I love this idea!

[wizard509]

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

[Gare]

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

[wizard509]

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

[angelize]

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.